Organizational Demography: The Differential Effects of Age and Tenure Distributions on Technical Communication

Zenger, Todd; Lawrence, Barbara

doi:10.5465/256366

Cited by 375 publications

(505 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…One would expect representatives of a functional group to have more contacts and greater ease of communication with members of that same group given their shared language, socialization, and worldview (Dougherty, 1988;Lawrence & Lorsch, 1969). This result complements those of Zenger and Lawrence, (1989) who found that within a single functional area, homogeneity was associated with communication, even across team boundaries.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 49%

Demography and Design: Predictors of New Product Team Performance

Ancona

Caldwell

1992

Organization Science

1,457

1,078

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The increasing reliance on teams in organizations raises the question of how these teams should be formed. Should they be formed completely of engineers or should they include a range of specialists? Should they be made up to people who have long tenure in the organization, or those with a wide range of experience? As teams increasingly get called upon to do more complex tasks and to cross functional boundaries within the organization, conventional wisdom has suggested that teams be composed of more diverse members. This study suggests that the answer may not be so simple. Using 409 individuals from 45 new product teams in five high-technology companies, this study investigates the impact of diversity on team performance. We found that functional and tenure diversity each has its own distinct effects. The greater the functional diversity, the more team members communicated outside the team's boundaries. This communication was with a variety of groups such as marketing, manufacturing, and top management. The more the external communication, the higher the managerial ratings of innovation. Tenure diversity had its impact on internal group dynamics rather than external communications. Tenure diversity is associated with improved task work such as clarifying group goals and setting priorities. In turn, this clarity is associated with high team ratings of overall performance. Yet diversity is not solely positive. While it does produce internal processes and external communications that facilitate performance, it also directly impedes performance. That is, overall the effect of diversity on performance is negative, even though some aspects of group work are enhanced. It may be that for these teams diversity brings more creativity to problem solving and product development, but it impedes implementation because there is less capability for teamwork than there is for homogeneous teams. These research findings suggest that simply changing the structure of teams (i.e. combining representatives of diverse function and tenure) will not improve performance. The team must find a way to garner the positive process effects of diversity and to reduce the negative direct effects. At the team level, greater negotiation and conflict resolution skills may be necessary. At the organization level, the team may need to be protected from external political pressures and rewarded for team, rather than functional, outcomes.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 49%

Demography and Design: Predictors of New Product Team Performance

Ancona

Caldwell

1992

Organization Science

1,457

1,078

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“…As Schneider (1983) argued, organizations left to their own devices will continue to recruit similar others until the entire organization is homogeneous. Homogeneity can be advantageous for organizations by increasing psychological attachment to group members (Tsui, Egan, & O'Reilly, 1992), increasing communication (Zenger & Lawrence, 1989), and reducing turnover (Jackson, 1992;O'Reilly, Caldwell, & Barnett, 1989;Wagner, Pfeffer, & O'Reilly, 1984). Diversity can be advantageous for organizations by increasing flexibility and adaptiveness (Schneider, 1983;Simons, Berkowitz, & Moyer, 1970) and by increasing innovativeness (Jackson, 1992;Schneider, 1983).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Choosing Work Group Members: Balancing Similarity, Competence, and Familiarity

Hinds

Carley

Wholey

2000

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

338

246

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This study explores one of the contributors to group composition-the basis on which people choose others with whom they want to work. We use a combined model to explore individual attributes, relational attributes, and previous structural ties as determinants of work partner choice. Four years of data from participants in 33 small project groups were collected, some of which reflects individual participant characteristics and some of which is social network data measuring the previous relationship between two participants. Our results suggest that when selecting future group members people are biased toward others of the same race, others who have a reputation for being competent and hard working, and others with whom they have developed strong working relationships in the past. These results suggest that people strive for predictability when choosing future work group members. ᭧ 2000 Academic PressPeople often play either a direct or an indirect role in choosing their work partners. In volunteer organizations, people decide which group or committee to join. Academics decide who to collaborate with on research projects. And,

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“…Heterogeneous groups, compared to homogeneous groups, exhibit less cohesiveness (O'Reilly et al 1989), less communication (Zenger and Lawrence 1989), and more conflict between members (Jehn et al 1999;Pelled et al 1999). Thus a dilemma exists: members of heterogeneous groups tend to cognitively engage more deeply in tasks but are less likely to get along.…”

Section: The Relationship Between Social Category Diversity Relationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Category Diversity Promotes Premeeting Elaboration: The Role of Relationship Focus

Loyd

Wang

Phillips

et al. 2013

Organization Science

128

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A purported downside of social category diversity is decreased relationship focus (i.e., one’s focus on establishing a positive social bond with a coworker). However, we argue that this lack of relationship focus serves as a central mechanism that improves information processing even prior to interaction and, ultimately, decision-making performance in diverse settings. We introduce the construct of premeeting elaboration (i.e., the extent to which individuals consider their own and others’ perspectives in the anticipation of an interaction) and explore its link with social category diversity and relationship focus. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that when disagreement occurs, social category diversity increases premeeting elaboration, with relationship focus as a central causal mechanism. Experiment 3 shows that premeeting elaboration has important implications for performance: disagreeing dyads with social category diversity elaborate more prior to meeting and, as a result, perform better on a decision-making task than those with social category homogeneity. We discuss the value of studying early-stage interaction and propose a reconsideration of the “downside” of social category diversity.

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Organizational Demography: The Differential Effects of Age and Tenure Distributions on Technical Communication

Cited by 375 publications

References 36 publications

Demography and Design: Predictors of New Product Team Performance

Demography and Design: Predictors of New Product Team Performance

Choosing Work Group Members: Balancing Similarity, Competence, and Familiarity

Social Category Diversity Promotes Premeeting Elaboration: The Role of Relationship Focus

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