When was the last time you shared information with your colleague from abroad or of the opposite sex at your work place? And how frequently do you do this? And now think of how frequently you shared information with colleagues from your own country or of the same sex?

The fact is that we love people that are similar to us and even ascribe higher status to people who are like us. This impacts our preference for collaboration: we prefer collaborating with people with high status because we think that they are worth the time we invest in them; we think we can achieve great things together. The flipside of this is that when people are different from us, we ascribe them lower status, and we spend less time sharing information with them. This condition of implicit preferences may have a deteriorating effect on performance of dissimilar individuals in areas where people need to combine unique information, ideas and perspectives.

At most work places, the majority of individuals are similar to each other. They share information with each other. Therefore, their performance is not negatively affected. Individuals who are dissimilar from their colleagues are the ones who have difficulty to have access to information, and thus are negatively affected. How these dissimilarities impact the information access and performance of individuals was the topic of my PhD dissertation (2017).

In my studies, I have shown that foreigners are indeed being affected, but actually not all foreigners are equally affected: the level of similarity matters. People prefer those foreigners whose cultures are similar to theirs and share more information with them. In one of my experiments I found that Dutch participants shared more information with German participants than with Chinese participants. This affected the performance of Chinese participants negatively. Interestingly, this effect disappeared when an observer of the team interactions was added to the team: being observed creates a sense of accountability for one’s behavior.

In another study I showed that when employees notice the expertise of their dissimilar colleagues, they start to ignore the dissimilarities of these individuals, and share more information with them, which increases the performance of dissimilar individuals.

Finally, in another study, I found that diversity increases information sharing among the team members, which results in higher performance because when the team is highly diverse, team members perceive the team as a single entity instead of subgroups of nationalities.

What does this mean in practice?

1. Increasing feelings of accountability increases the frequency of information sharing behavior with dissimilar individuals in the workplace. My studies demonstrated that creating public observability at the work place is one of the measures that managers can take, e.g. open-plan office arrangements.
2. Managers could intentionally point their employees’ attention to the expertise of dissimilar individuals, which has shown to increase information sharing.
3. Managers could increase the diversity in a team when there is a foreigner in a team. Nationality diversity alleviates the negative effects of nationality dissimilarity.

If you are interested in my studies on “Demographic Dissimilarity, Information Access and Individual Performance” you can download a free copy of my Ph.D. dissertation from the following link:  https://repub.eur.nl/pub/103495

Dr. Burcu Subasi (b.subasi rug.nl) is working at the Faculty of Economics and Business on a project about how to increase decision making performance of individuals in order to enhance resilience against disruptions.

Reference

Subaşi, B. (2017, December 21). Demographic Dissimilarity, Information Access and Individual Performance (No. EPS-2017-422- ORG). ERIM Ph.D. Series Research in Management. Erasmus University Rotterdam.