Content area
Full text
We used self-categorization theory--which proposes that people may use social characteristics such as age, race, or organizational membership to define psychological groups and to promote a positive self-identity--to develop and test hypotheses about the effects of demographic diversity in organizations on an individual's psychological and behavioral attachment to the organization. Individual-level commitment, attendance behavior, and tenure intentions were examined as function of the individual's degree of difference from others on such social categories as age, tenure, education, sex, and race. We expected that the effect of being different would have different effects for minorities (i.e., women and nonwhites) than for members of the majority (i.e., men and whites). Analyses of a sample of 151 groups comprising 1,705 respondents showed that increasing work-unit diversity was associated with lower levels of psychological attachment among group members. Nonsymmetrical effects were found for sex and race, with whites and men showing larger negative effects for increased unit heterogeneity than nonwhites and women. The results of the study call into question the fundamental assumption that underlies much of race and gender research in organizations--that the effect of heterogeneity is always felt by the minority.*
A careful reading of several distinct bodies of research dealing with social groups and diversity reveals a puzzling omission and a serious contradiction. First, both scholars and the popular press have noted the dramatic increase of women and minorities in the U.S. labor force leg., Ahlburg and Kimmel, 1986; Johnston and Packer, 1987; Offerman and Gowing, 1990). Managing a diverse workforce is an oft-repeated challenge confronting managers in the 1990s. A clear implication of this increasing workforce heterogeneity is that more and more individuals are likely to work with people who are demographically different from them in terms of age, gender, race, and ethnicity. Increasing diversity and global competition appear to be the management topics of the next decade leg., Thomas, 1990), but relatively little work on organizations has explored the full impact of this diversity. Most work has analyzed the impact of minorities in work groups. Kanter (1977b) has theorized that unbalanced subgroup membership may highlight distinctions among members and focus attention on those in the minority. Minority individuals may experience social isolation and hostility (O'Farrell and Harlan, 1982). While the effects of being a...