Temporal Dynamics of Work Team Diversity

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Florian Kunze
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance ; Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 321298269

Organizational works teams are getting increasingly diverse due to trends like the demographic change and an increasing workforce participation of women. Unfortunately field research on work team diversity and its relation to team processes and outcomes has produced inconsistent results to date. In this proposal I argue that this inconsistencies are caused by dominant static research designs that used cross-sectional data to assess team diversity and its relation to team processes and outcomes. Effects of team diversity might, however, very likely depend on whether diversity in a team is stable or varies over the time course. If diversity varies over time within teams negative social-categorization mechanism (i.e., subgrouping and mutual discrimination based on various diversity criteria) might be the dominant mechanism leading to negative team processes and outcome. If, in contrast, team diversity is stable over the time course increased social interaction between diverse team members, might allow team members to dismantle stereotypes and thus enable productive interaction to reap the benefits of diversity. While simulation studies have shown that these different effects of diversity exists depending on temporal dynamics, no field research with real organizational data has tackled this research issue yet. In the planed research project we want to address this research gap by analyzing an already existing panel data set of 1.500 service work teams with overall 16.000 team members of a service company over a six year time period. For these teams we will get full information on their demographic composition in each year, as well as archival information on the performance (service quality) and health related outcomes. Additionally, to also integrate team processes and the team context factor in our analysis we have the self-reported information of a yearly employee survey. The research project will consist of a mixed-method design in three phases. First, we will develop and execute a panel data analysis that allows us to test the temporal changes in diversity composition and their causal relation to changes in outcomes over time. Following recent developments in the diversity literature, we will apply the faultline approach that allows measuring diversity not based on single criteria (i.e., age), but by the interrelation of multiple criteria (i.e., age, gender, ethnic background). Second, we strive to get a better understanding of potential context factors for the investigated relationships, by selecting extreme cases (teams) that either favor or support our temporal diversity hypothesis and doing qualitative interviews with the team members. Third, based on the qualitative results, contextual hypotheses will be quantitatively tested through collection new survey data in three waves.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants