Organizational Demographic Faultlines: Their Impact on Collective Organizational Identification, Firm Performance, and Firm Innovation
研究了企业层面基于年龄和性别的人口统计学断层线如何通过影响员工的集体组织认同，间接作用于企业绩效和创新，并发现功能异质性决定了这种影响是正面还是负面。
Abstract In this study, we seek to understand the consequences of demographic faultlines at the organizational level. Drawing from the faultline and cross‐categorization literature, we suggest that organizational demographic faultlines (based on age and gender) have the potential to either reduce or enhance employees’ collective organizational identification and, thereby, indirectly influence firm performance and innovation. Whether organizational demographic faultlines have detrimental or beneficial effects depends on the functional heterogeneity within faultline‐based demographic subgroups, where heterogeneity is defined as the extent to which subgroup members belong to different functional departments. We theorize that this functional heterogeneity alters the degree of social integration between demographic subgroups. Results from a multisource field study of demographic faultlines among 5,495 employees in 82 small and medium‐sized firms (<250 employees) support our model. We demonstrate that organizational demographic faultlines have important consequences, and we show that functional heterogeneity changes whether these consequences are negative or positive.