The researchers looked at anonymous employee surveys\u00a0administered at\u00a0a Boston-based professional services company\u00a0between 1995 and 2002 that\u00a0measured cooperation, trust and work enjoyment; they also analyzed the teams\u2019 revenue over that same time period.<\/p>\n
\n
The managers of firms face the challenge of assembling a workforce and a culture that<\/div>\n
will succeed in the task at hand. The results of this paper shed light on how actual and<\/div>\n
perceived diversity is associated with indicators of firm social capital and measures of<\/div>\n
ultimate office performance, revenues.<\/div>\n
We find that the perception that a firm is supportive of diversity in an office is posi-<\/div>\n
tively associated with indications of the level of cooperation in that office. Other proxies<\/div>\n
for social capital or corporate culture, such as employee morale and satisfaction, were<\/div>\n
also higher in offices in which this perception was higher. Nevertheless, the presence of<\/div>\n
actual gender diversity was a significant factor in<\/div>\n
reducing<\/div>\n
these same measures of social<\/div>\n
capital. At the same time, tenure diversity had little measurable association with proxies<\/div>\n
for social capital.<\/div>\n
Inoursecondsetofresults,weinvestigatethedeterminantsofoffice-levelrevenues.<\/div>\n
We find that the perception that the firm accepts diversity has no estimated payoff in this<\/div>\n
dimension. Interestingly, gender diversity is associated with a positive contribution to<\/div>\n
revenues, although this effect is diminished once office-level fixed effects are included.<\/div>\n
In contrast, tenure diversity is associated with lower revenues.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
We note an interesting contrast between our results on tenure diversity and gender<\/div>\n
diversity. Tenure diversity had little association with our measure of social capital but<\/div>\n
a strong negative association with performance. Gender diversity seems to affect the<\/div>\n
functioning of the firm in quite a different way. Our first set of results suggests that<\/div>\n
gender diversity could have detrimental impacts on the formation of firm social capital,<\/div>\n
but the revenue results suggest that whatever impacts it had were outweighed or at least<\/div>\n
canceled by the direct contribution of gender diversity in the office<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Should you opt for diversity, picking an equal number of men and women to comprise your team, or should you instead create a single-gender office? Well, it all depends on whether you\u2019re aiming for a happy staff\u2014or a productive … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-finance","category-w-t-w"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t