Perspective—The Black Box of Organizational Demography

Abstract

Since its definition in the early 1980s, organizational demography has become an influential research area. Scholars map the relationship between demographic variables and organizational outcomes, examining such questions as whether increasing work group diversity leads to greater turnover and whether decreasing tenure similarity within a top management team leads to more numerous strategic reorientations. Asking such questions requires only a demographic predictor and an outcome, but answering them often requires additional theoretical constructs. For example, the relationship between work group diversity and turnover might be explained by communication and conflict. As work group diversity increases, communication within the group may become more difficult, resulting in greater conflict and thus increasing turnover. Despite the important, sometimes critical, role of such additional theoretical concepts, researchers often leave them loosely specified and unmeasured, creating a “black box” filled with vague, untested theories. This article presents a critical analysis of this approach. The results show that simple demographic explanations may generate multiple, mutually exclusive, often implicit theories involving numerous additional concepts. An evaluation of these more complex theories against previous research shows that they receive only weak support. Hence, the black box approach to organizational demography presents serious theoretical problems. Examples are provided to illuminate these problems. Four directions are suggested for research in organizational demography: deepening current variance explanations, creating dynamic models, exploring factors that produce demographic distributions, and moving beyond the variance model.

A social-cognitive approach to understanding gender differences in negotiator ethics: The role of moral identity

“…We attempt to take one step toward eliminating the treatment of gender as a ''black box." Studying demographic variables as black boxes (without insight into their underlying psychological constructs) allows for prediction, but it eliminates explanation, obscuring clear thinking (Lawrence, 1997). Our findings suggest that gender is a proxy for moral identity, which predicts unethical behavior under certain circumstances.…”

Joint Impact of Interdependence and Group Diversity on Innovation

“…According to this perspective, as demographic diversity increases so do the group's cognitive resources and the ability to engage in more complex and innovative problem-solving (Bantel & Jackson, 1989;Jackson & Ruderman, 1995;Watson et al, 1993). However, other researchers have noted that demographic characteristics do not covary perfectly with these underlying psychological attributes (Bantel & Jackson, 1989;Hambrick & Mason, 1984), and that the link between demographic and cognitive diversity may be more complex than generally assumed (Kilduff et al, 2000;Lawrence, 1997). For this reason, this study tested the possible effects of both cognitive and demographic diversity in work teams simultaneously.…”

Journal of Organizational Behavior

“…The degrees to which demographic individual differences are task relevant (e.g., functional background) are proposed to be important for the potency of diversity effects (Lawrence, 1997;Harrison, Price, & Bell, 1998). Indeed, several meta-analyses have demonstrated that the nature of the team's task accounts for the fluctuating impact of individual heterogeneity in teams (Bell, 2007;Bowers, Pharmer, & Salas, 2000;Stewart, 2006).…”