Abstract

We use fine-grained federal personnel data to examine how work group diversity is related to the distribution of monetary rewards among employees who are working collectively on a team project. We focus on two types of diversity—demographic and functional—and hypothesize that the former will be positively associated with egalitarianism in reward distributions while the latter will be negatively associated with egalitarianism. Our theory is that managers’ distributional decisions will account for the likelihood of meeting with disagreement, and that this likelihood covaries in different ways with demographic and functional diversity. We argue that managers of demographically heterogeneous groups will deploy egalitarian rewards to avoid exacerbating intra-group conflict along demographic fault-lines. By contrast, managers of functionally heterogeneous groups will be able to justify non-egalitarian rewards because group members accept that functional heterogeneity is associated with intra-group status differences. Additionally, we argue that functional heterogeneity can, by legitimizing intra-group status differences that are correlated with race and gender, activate the negative potential for demographic diversity to be a driver of inequality. Our results suggest that functional heterogeneity and demographic heterogeneity are negatively associated with egalitarianism in group rewards, and that functional heterogeneity interacts with demographic heterogeneity to further reduce egalitarianism.

摘要

我们使用细粒度的联邦人事数据来检查工作组的多样性与在团队项目中集体工作的员工之间的金钱奖励分配之间的关系。我们关注两种类型的多样性——人口和功能——并假设前者将与奖励分配中的平等主义正相关，而后者将与平等主义负相关。我们的理论是，经理的分配决策将解释会见分歧的可能性，并且这种可能性以不同的方式与人口和职能多样性相关联。我们认为，人口异质群体的管理者将部署平等奖励，以避免沿着人口断层线加剧群体内冲突。相比之下，功能异质性群体的管理者将能够证明非平等奖励是合理的，因为群体成员接受功能异质性与群体内地位差异有关。此外，我们认为，功能异质性可以通过使与种族和性别相关的群体内地位差异合法化，激活人口多样性成为不平等驱动因素的负面潜力。我们的结果表明功能异质性 激活人口多样性成为不平等驱动因素的负面潜力。我们的结果表明功能异质性 激活人口多样性成为不平等驱动因素的负面潜力。我们的结果表明功能异质性和人口异质性与群体奖励中的平等主义负相关，并且功能异质性与人口异质性相互作用以进一步降低平等主义。