Investigating Complex Diversity Relationships in Organizations

Increasing diversity of their workforce in terms of age, gender, nationality, or even personality is a key challenge for many organizations today. Despite increasing interest in this research area in the last two decades (van Dijk, van Engen, & van Knippenberg, 2013; van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007) still many blind spots in this area exists, and executives in organizations cannot be sure when and how diversity is something good or bad for their team and/or organizational performance. One fruitful approach to better explore this blind spots in diversity research, is to consider more complex diversity relationships on different levels in organizations that go beyond the research on the relationship of single demographic diversity dimensions (e.g., gender diversity) and collective outcomes that have been the main focus of diversity scholars so far. Underrepresented complex diversity issues are, for example, the role of deep-level diversity characteristics (Harrison, Price, & Bell, 1998; Harrison, Price, Gavin, & Florey, 2002) for collective outcomes, the interaction and combination of several diversity issues as so called faultlines (Lau & Murnighan, 1998, 2005), and the effects of diversity not only on the team level, but also in whole organizations.

In this research project I will create new theoretical and empirical insights and practical relevant results on complex diversity relationships on three level of analysis in organization. First on the dyadic level of analysis I will investigate, how deep-level diversity differences (i.e., personality, traits, attitudes) affect the dyadic relationship between leader and follower, and which role leadership factors play as explanation for the linkage between these differences and individual performance. Second, on the team level of analysis, I will research how gender diversity creates faultlines in combination with other surface-level (age, tenure) and deep-level diversity (personality) characteristics, and how these faultlines affect group processes and performance. Third, on the organizational level, I will investigate, how deep-level diversity attributes (i.e., personality, traits, attitudes) affect organizational processes and performance, beyond existing research on surface-level characteristics.

To answer the three research question on each level of analysis, I will carry out three distinct empirical studies. For each level of analysis a separate multi-company dataset will be collected and analyzed with current psychometric and econometric methods.