> You may say -- "aha, but culture fit is a proxy for racism". Fine, then people are racists -- in that very implicit, system-wide way that's immune to sensitivity training and generic pressure in the wider culture. What to do then, shoot the racists?
You can say that while "shared mental context" is important, the research says that diverse teams are higher functioning teams [1] (one of the things myself and the author of the memo would agree on is that groupthink is a bad thing!), and that if culture fit is one of the blockers, find a way of retaining its good aspects while removing its potentially deleterious ones. Some of the world's smartest people work at Google. I'm sure they can have a role in figuring it out.
That could very well be because racists are underperformers -- they are racists, which is some kind of overgeneralization bias.
Then there's fit to organizational purposes. It's doubtful that Google or SpaceX could function as an organization of racists, but maybe that level of homogeneity is best for a tire repair shop in rural areas.
You can say that while "shared mental context" is important, the research says that diverse teams are higher functioning teams [1] (one of the things myself and the author of the memo would agree on is that groupthink is a bad thing!), and that if culture fit is one of the blockers, find a way of retaining its good aspects while removing its potentially deleterious ones. Some of the world's smartest people work at Google. I'm sure they can have a role in figuring it out.
https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter