How to get the timing right. A computational model of the effects of the timing of contacts on team cohesion in demographically diverse teams

Andreas Flache () and Michael Mäs ()
Additional contact information
Andreas Flache: ICS, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of Groningen
Michael Mäs: ICS, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of Groningen

Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, 2008, vol. 14, issue 1, No 2, 23-51

Abstract: Abstract Lau and Murnighan’s faultline theory explains negative effects of demographic diversity on team performance as consequence of strong demographic faultlines. If demographic differences between group members are correlated across various dimensions, the team is likely to show a “subgroup split” that inhibits communication and effective collaboration between team members. Our paper proposes a rigorous formal and computational reconstruction of the theory. Our model integrates four elementary mechanisms of social interaction, homophily, heterophobia, social influence and rejection into a computational representation of the dynamics of both opinions and social relations in the team. Computational experiments demonstrate that the central claims of faultline theory are consistent with the model. We show furthermore that the model highlights a new structural condition that may give managers a handle to temper the negative effects of strong demographic faultlines. We call this condition the timing of contacts. Computational analyses reveal that negative effects of strong faultlines critically depend on who is when brought in contact with whom in the process of social interactions in the team. More specifically, we demonstrate that faultlines have hardly negative effects when teams are initially split into demographically homogeneous subteams that are merged only when a local consensus has developed.

Keywords: Demographic faultline; Computational modeling; Teams; Demographic diversity; Homophily; Social influence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10588-008-9019-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:comaot:v:14:y:2008:i:1:d:10.1007_s10588-008-9019-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10588

DOI: 10.1007/s10588-008-9019-1

Access Statistics for this article

Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory is currently edited by Terrill Frantz and Kathleen Carley

More articles in Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().