Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: How Group Diversity Affects Newcomer’s and Group’s Cooperation and Coordination

University Of Arkansas, Fayetteville AR

Investigators

Abstract

Improvement in technology, changes in cultural norms, and the expansion of opportunities has diversified American workforce. Small teams have become an integral part of how organizations accomplish tasks and achieve their goals. Many work teams are dynamic in their compositions with new members often being added to preexisting teams. However, our understanding of how teams function generally assumes a static setting with limited changes in group compositions and fails to capture the fluidity in group dynamics in the real-world workplaces. Our research bridges this gap by investigating whether and how a team, including old and new members, responds following an addition of a newcomer. Understanding how newcomers’ social identity affects their coordination and cooperation, and those decisions by the old team is relevant to organizations at all levels. Our work will shed light on how organizations could integrate newcomers from different backgrounds more successfully, thus improving teams’ performance and boosting productivity. This research also expands the frontier of our knowledge on how to forge a diverse workforce that will operate more efficiently on an aggregate level. It thus has direct implications for the output of the U.S. economy and that of the world economy. Understanding group dynamics and its implications for economic decision making and efficiency presents an unprecedented urgency for many organizations. This project uses a series of lab experiments to investigate how social identity affects coordination and cooperation in dynamic groups. The results from this project can inform us about the role that individuals’ identities and group composition play in decisions by individuals to maximize social welfare, to prioritize organizational goals above self-interest, and to exert more effort. The insights from this study have the potential to contribute to the theoretical and empirical knowledge in economics. Firstly, our work will provide an empirical foundation for incorporating dynamic group composition into our understanding of individual behavior in economic decision making. We expand the understanding of groups by studying how newcomers’ identity impacts groups, and how groups’ composition impacts old members and newcomers. Secondly, we contribute to the literature on diversity and its implications for productivity. This is an area of research that has implications on how organizations design work teams to function effectively together. Finally, our research will contribute to the literature on gender differences in behavior. We add to this literature an understanding of dynamic group gender composition and its impact on the performance of men and women. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.