An Empirical Study Of The Relationship Between Group Diversity, Knowledge Management And Team Performance

With the increasingly fierce competition in globalization and the arrival of knowledge economy, workforce diversity and knowledge management have become two main sources of competitive advantages for organizations. The diverse workforce can bring the required heterogeneous information, knowledge and resources into the organization, while through the accumulation, innovation, sharing and application of these knowledge, knowledge management can provide the guaranteed knowledge for organizational tasks. Unfortunately, due to their different study concerns, little research has been tried to combine the two areas. In practice, the diverse workforce is also a challenge for company. What’s more, many companies are facing frustration on how to manage knowledge successfully. Thus, how to take advantage of the heterogeneous knowledge brought by the diverse workforce through knowledge management, and avoid the negative impact of diversification effectively has been a major problem for organizations.Existing researches show that the function mechanism lie in workforce diversity on organizational performance is the information elaboration process triggered by diversity. And scholars have gradually realized that knowledge sharing and knowledge integration are the two key processes of knowledge management. Therefore, this research compares and integrates the two core process of knowledge management and the main process of the CEM(Classification-Elaboration Model), builds a model which can look at the mechanism of workforce diversity from knowledge management perspective, and then, introduces the implementation strategies and mechanisms in knowledge management into diversity management, and analysis their theoretical applicability.By the combination of workforce diversity research and knowledge management studies, we can not only expand the existing research fields, but also recover shortcomings. And through a look of original research from a new perspective, research focus in workforce diversity will no longer be the negative output, but rather the competitive advantage of diversity workforce, and knowledge management can pay more attention on its research basis-for only the diverse knowledge deserves to be shared and integrated, and has the possibility to create new knowledge. Therefore, after the literature review of the two fields, with the use of statistical softwares such as SPSS and AMOS, this study analysis the relationship between group diversity, knowledge management, group innovation and decision-making. Results show that:(1) in diverse groups, significant positive relationships lies between "Seperation" and "Diversity" diversity with group innovation and decision-making, however, the "Disparity" diversity has negative impacts on the two outputs;(2)knowledge sharing does not have mediating effects on the relationship between "Seperation" and "Diversity" diversity and group innovation, while has mediating effects on the relationship between the "Disparity" diversity and group innovation, and the relationship between all three kinds of diversity and group innovation;(3)knowledge integration is a mediating variable between all three kinds of diversity and group innovation and group decision-making, what’s more, plays an entirely mediator between "Disparity" diversity and group decision-making;(4) the interaction effect between knowledge sharing and knowledge integration do not influence group innovation and decision-making significantly.