Integrating new hires is a common challenge for organizations. Newcomers offer mixed blessings, helping to disrupt old processes, generate team reflection, and improve outcomes, even as they struggle to gain acceptance. One... [ view full abstract ]
Integrating new hires is a common challenge for organizations. Newcomers offer mixed blessings, helping to disrupt old processes, generate team reflection, and improve outcomes, even as they struggle to gain acceptance. One troubling possibility is that those defined as members of an out-group are not accepted, and therefore have little capacity to contribute to organizational learning or change. A more optimistic account is that newcomer’s distinctive capacities are valued, leading to both acceptance and innovation. Understanding how newcomers can be an asset rather than a source of team conflict is therefore of great importance.
Public administration diversity research has focused on bio-demographic factors such as race, ethnicity, and gender but given little attention to the ways by which newcomers introduce other forms of diversity. To understand these effects, we integrate newcomer and diversity theory, drawing from organization studies to adopt a functional perspective on diversity.
We utilize a randomized controlled field experiment to focus on one kind of social distinctiveness that may be of particular relevance to teams in real organizations, namely the educational background of the newcomers. On the one hand, newcomers with a different educational background may be more likely to stimulate more team reflection, because they may bring new insights that newcomers of similar educational background do not. On the other hand, educationally distinct newcomers may induce more conflict and be less accepted by existing team members.
The experiment, funded by the Danish Ministry of Education, added new employees to create work teams in Danish schools. The treatments were systematically varied by educational background – some hires shared the educational background of existing teachers, and some did not. Both types of newcomers were hired to fulfill a common team role of co-teacher in a classroom, working directly with other teachers on a day-to-day basis. The dependent variables include measures of newcomer acceptance in the form of newcomer attributes (perceived competence) and perceived effects on team dynamics (newcomer cooperativeness). We also examine the effect of newcomers on team reflection processes, measured by discussions of student learning, and observation and evaluation of teaching strategies.
While prior work offers mixed evidence that socially distinct newcomers face higher friction as a result of negative social categorization, we offer evidence of such an effect in a field experiment setting. We find that existing staff are less accepting of educationally distinct newcomers, evaluating them as less cooperative and competent relative to new employees that share their educational background. These negative social categorizations occur despite objective evidence that socially distinct new hires performed just as well as other new hires. At the same time, both types of newcomers were associated with similar levels of team reflection processes, which were significantly higher than a control group that received no new employees. The results therefore show that educational background is a salient form of social distinction resulting in more distinctive newcomers struggling to gain inclusion, even as they generate the same types of benefits as newcomers that share the educational background of existing team members.
functional_diversity_employees_irspm.pdf 