Why Democrats And Republicans May Make The Best Teammates At Work – Forbes

With Black History Month in full swing and International Womens Day just around the corner in March, conversations centered on the importance of diversity in the workplace are on the rise. Indeed, studies continue to show that companies with more diverse senior leadership teams consistently outperform those with more homogeneous teams. Although there is movement in the right direction with, for example, women occupying an increasingly larger percentage of CEO roles at Fortune 500 companies, there is still much work to be done.

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One area of diversity that is less often discussed is one that is also critical in this election year: political diversity. It can sometimes feel like the heated battle between Democrats and Republicans in the United States is only getting hotter. Speakers on one side of the political spectrum continue to be silenced on college campuses by those on the opposite end. What was once healthy disagreement about ideas for how to make the country better has boiled over into vitriol. Surveys conducted over the past 20+ years by the Pew Research Center show that political polarization continues to reach historic levels.

In that case, the last thing in the world one would want would be to place a staunch Republican and an undying Democrat on the same team at work; surely that would be a recipe for disaster. Fortunately, Denise Loyd, formerly of MITs Sloan School of Management and now an Associate Professor of Business Administration at UIUCs Gies College of Business, led a study that tested just this. The authors specifically wanted to see what happens when you tell two peopleone Democrat and one Republicanthat they are about to have a discussion with one another on a topic about which they disagree vehemently. Let the fireworks begin!

But what actually happens is a bit surprising. When Professor Loyd and colleagues ran the experiment in the lab, they actually found that there were many positive effects of such an arrangement. In particular, when a Democrat is told that he or she will meet with a Republican to discuss a problem on which they dont see eye to eye, both parties actually prepare much more carefully for the meetingdigging deeper into the evidence, preparing for more counterarguments, and generally coming to the table more thoroughly prepared. This enhanced preparation, the authors show, actually improves objective decision-making by the partners as well. Diverse groups (juries, in this case) also have been shown to discuss more information, bring up more accurate information, and correct inaccurate information more successfully.

The theorized reason for this improvement in preparation comes down to the mindset with which people enter a meeting or discussion with someone they suspect disagrees with them. Broadly, there are two distinct mindsets with which employees can enter into a work setting: relationship focus or task focus. When focused on relationships, employees have the goal of making friends and building bonds; when focused on tasks, employees instead set their sights on effective task completion. While not always directly at odds with one another (one can indeed have both a high relationship focus as well as a high task focus), people inherently have limited cognitive resources such that an orientation toward a task will naturally come with less proclivity to build relationships, or vice versa.

Friendly relationships with others at work, sometimes even at the expense of the task, are not necessarily a bad thing. Work friends provide social support, which can allow employees to better handle everyday stressors. But friendships also come with risks and costs, one being that when you are meeting with people who are similar to you and with whom you are quite friendly, you may be less inclined to rock the boat by potentially disagreeing with them. When solving difficult problems at work, though, it is imperative that everyonewhether the intern who just started on Monday or the CEO who helped found the companystate their views unambiguously. (McKinsey & Company actually has memorialized this idea in one of its famed values, the obligation to dissent.) In the case of a consulting firm solving a potentially billion dollar problem for its client, the cost of an affiliative mindset can be high, and work teams would do better to put aside their relational concerns and focus on the task, which can be fostered by building diverse teams.

And its just not political diversity either. Although not explicitly tested, Loyd and colleagues theorizing with respect to the benefits of diverse groups extends to any category of diversity, ranging from age or ethnic diversity to less visible diversity on deep-seated attitudes and values. So, although it can feel good to hire people and build teams with those who have similar backgrounds and interests as you, the best bet for your business is to ensure youre truly uncovering the full range of ideas and beliefs about a given topic by building more diverse teams.

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Why Democrats And Republicans May Make The Best Teammates At Work - Forbes