Strategic Advantage or Strategic Hinderance?: Achieving the Promise of Diversity in Joint Planning Outcomes
Abstract
Diversity in a workforce offers an approach to achieve creative thinking, yet the DoD has struggled to achieve Diversity and Equity amongst the joint force. The DoD Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) initiative focuses on retention, recruiting, and training for a future force and fails to take into account how to employ diversity in the force today. Design approaches to DEIA fails to address behaviors that enhance and realize the potential of diversity. National security solutions are developed at the combatant and component commands through planning teams. Planning teams, however, in the DoD lack gender diversity and the gender disparity might inhibit the development of the innovative solutions needed to solve national security challenges and resolve dilemmas. Previous research on whether mixed gender teams lead to more novel ideas has been inconclusive. One critical factor believed to undermine the benefits of creativity in mixed gender teams is the degraded cohesiveness of diverse teams. Literature indicates behaviors detrimental to cohesion and communication are also maladaptive to team dynamics and inhibitory to creativity. Surveys and field observation suggests leadership framing and mitigation play a significant role in addressing and building team cohesion that begets increased creativity and innovation on planning teams.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 27, 2022
- Accession Number
- AD1176993
Entities
People
- Ann-kristine H. Thrift
Organizations
- National Defense University