Gender And Culture Diversity Occurring In Sell-formed Work Groups.(Statistical Data Included)

Fortunately, the vast majority of our students identified with a single country of origin, minimizing the problem of "mixed" alignments for ancestry. This is probably due to the recent immigrant status of a large percentage of the students. In our preliminary work with groups of students who were not recent immigrants, dual endorsements for ancestry were more common. In future investigations, where there is a population of people who have been American for several generations and mixed endorsements may be more likely, a more suitable process for addressing this issue of multiple racial and ancestral identifications will need to be developed.

The large percentage of recent immigrants in our student sample may also have contributed to the homogeneity of groups. Our findings might have been different had the students been second- or third-generation Americans. This possibility is not problematic for the study's broader implications, since recent immigrants account for the increased diversity occurring in the United States. However, a question for future research is whether the salience of ancestry to group formation is as strong for individuals who have been American for several generations as for recent immigrants.

IMPLICATIONS FOR MANAGEMENT

This study confirms in a scientific manner what many of us see as outcomes in our everyday lives. When left to their own initiative, people appear to prefer working with others of the same race and ancestry. While the tendency to organize on the basis of gender may be intuitively less obvious, it too occurred in these work groups as predicted by the hypotheses of the study. Thus, these findings suggest that diverse work groups will not arise simply because workers are inclined to assemble in a diverse way.

It should be emphasized that students chose homogeneity quickly even though there was ample time to organize in a diverse manner. In fact, most groups were established in a matter of minutes. This suggests a strong and pervasive effect even in the absence of key structural barriers such as the lack of a common language or family ties limiting outside interactions. This is a pressure for homogeneous alignment that management should not underestimate if it wishes to foster organizational diversity on the basis of gender and cultural variables. Since the formal organization contains many informal networks, voluntary alignments can have a significant impact on a variety of organizational decisions ranging from who knows first about a job opportunity to who is given the benefit of the doubt in a hiring decision or in the allocation of scarce resources.

Informal networks derived from gender and cultural alignments, along with the tendency of social similarity to increase liking (Tsui and O'Reilly, 1989) and influence (Cialdini, 1987), can be an important combination in maintaining the status quo within an organization. Conversely, this same combination may be an important factor in creating a new status quo as a different group slowly moves into positions of power and influence. Thus, it would not be surprising, in light of these findings, to observe an organization that began with all men in the top of its hierarchy, at a later date, to find itself with all women in the very same positions. This could happen as the informal network, under ambiguous circumstances such as those associated with high-level hiring and promotional decisions (Kanter, 1977), continues a pull toward gender and cultural homogeneity and gives preference to those in that network.

In sum, diversity in organizational decision-making groups does not appear to be an inevitable result of a more socially diverse organization. Despite the increasingly common diversity in organizations, it is not clear that the vast increases in cultural and gender diversity expected in the U.S. workforce in the next century will result in as much work group diversity as some may expect. If the tendency toward homogeneity is a fundamental human process, it is likely that it will slow down integration and attenuate diversity increases in many ways.

From a prescriptive point of view, if gender or cultural heterogeneity is beneficial to the decision-making process or to goals of organizational cohesion, active intervention by management, at least in the short run, may be needed to ensure that decision-making groups are diverse. For example, a study by Chatman et al., (1998) has shown that the benefits of demographic diversity are more likely to emerge in organizations that, through their culture, emphasize organizational membership and encourage people to hold the organization's interests in common, than in organizations that stress individualism and distinctiveness among members. This suggests that rewarding teamwork over individual initiative and cooperation over competition will contribute to group diversity.

Another study has shown that a greater degree of subgroup formation and in-fighting will occur in organizational groups characterized by a moderate level of diversity than in groups characterized by a high level of diversity (Lau and Murnighan, 1998). According to this study, managers who recruit candidates from only a small number of ethnic, age, and occupational groups risk subgroup division and conflict. Instead, managers would be wise to recruit group members with a large number of different and/or unique combinations of attributes.

These interesting examples demonstrate that management needs to take a proactive role if organizations are to benefit from diversity in the executive and managerial ranks and in powerful decision-making groups. Without vigilance, it would not be surprising to see a supplanting of one homogeneous group of a given gender or cultural background by another homogeneous group, even where diversity goals were the original impetus for change.

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