Demographic Process

Conceptual Overview

Anne S. Tsui and Barbara Gutek define three different approaches to demographic analyses: categorical, compositional, and relational. The categorical approach focuses on individual-level attributes and analyzes the experiences of people in specific categories such as women or minorities. The compositional approach evaluates how the distributional properties of a unit's demographic attributes influence the unit or the people within it. The relational approach analyzes individual experience as a consequence of being different from others on one or more demographic attributes.

Surface-level demographic attributes such as age, gender, race, ethnicity, and physical appearance are observable and may foster immediate, direct, and explicit implications. Deep-level attributes such as sexual orientation, personality, or values are not observable, and may lead to delayed, indirect, and implicit responses. The surfaceto deep-level continuum also includes some nonvisible detectable differences such as company tenure, job tenure, functional background, education level, and marital status. Frances Milliken and Luis Martins further classify demographic variables into job related such as job tenure or education, and non–job related such as religion and socioeconomic background.

Donn Byrne's similarity-attraction paradigm and Henri Tajfel's social identity theory serve as the major theoretical foundation for explaining the demographic process in organizations. These theories propose that individuals respond favorably to others with aligned characteristics. Studies have shown that age and tenure heterogeneity among work team members is negatively associated with group cohesion and positively associated with employee turnover. Demographic dissimilarities between a subordinate and the superior reduce supervisory affect toward and evaluation of the subordinate's performance. Group heterogeneity in race and gender is positively related to task and emotional conflict. Using the similarity-attraction paradigm and the resource-based view, demographic heterogeneity in top-management teams on age, tenure, educational level, and functional specialization is associated with team member turnover, innovation, [Page 379]strategic responses, strategic changes, and even the financial performance of the firm.

John Turner's self-categorization theory has been used to explain preferences for similar others without engaging in interpersonal interactions. Based on observable attributes, individuals have a tendency to categorize themselves and similar others into psychological groups. They then amplify the positive features of the psychological in-group and magnify the negative features of the out-group. This depersonalized demographic effect was demonstrated in large work units with an average size of almost 900 employees. Being different from others (who are unknown to the individual on a personal level) in race and gender in the unit led to lower organizational attachment, especially among males and white employees. The contact hypothesis predicts that increased contact between demographically diverse individuals or groups could reduce or dissipate the prejudicial views toward out-groups. It explains why the negative relationship between gender diversity and group cohesiveness does not exist for teams where members have spent a large amount of time together.

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