Birds, Birds, Birds: Co-worker Similarity, Workplace Diversity, and Voluntary Turnover

Boris Hirsch (), Elke Jahn and Thomas Zwick
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Boris Hirsch: Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH), and IZA Institute of Labor Economics

No 387, Working Paper Series in Economics from University of Lüneburg, Institute of Economics

Abstract: We investigate how the demographic composition of the workforce along the sex, nationality, education, age, and tenure dimension affects voluntary turnover. Fitting duration models for workers’ job-to-job moves that control for workplace fixed effects in a representative sample of large manufacturing plants in Germany during 1975–2016, we find that larger co-worker similarity in all five dimensions substantially depresses voluntary turnover whereas workplace diversity is of limited importance. In line with conventional wisdom, which has that birds of one feather flock together, our results suggest that workers prefer having co-workers of their kind and place less value on diverse workplaces.

Keywords: workforce demography; co-worker similarity; workplace diversity; voluntary turnover (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J19 J21 J62 J63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2019-05
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Working Paper: Birds, Birds, Birds: Co-Worker Similarity, Workplace Diversity, and Voluntary Turnover (2019)
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