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

技术的进步、文化规范的改变和机会的扩大使美国劳动力多样化。小团队已经成为组织完成任务和实现目标不可或缺的一部分。许多工作团队的组成是动态的，新成员经常被添加到先前存在的团队中。然而，我们对团队如何运作的理解通常假设团队组成的变化是有限的静态设置，未能捕捉到现实世界工作场所团队动态的流动性。我们的研究通过调查团队(包括新老成员)在新成员加入后是否以及如何做出反应来弥合这一差距。了解新人的社会认同如何影响他们的协调和合作，以及老团队的决定与各级组织相关。我们的工作将阐明组织如何更成功地整合来自不同背景的新成员，从而提高团队的绩效和生产率。这项研究还扩大了我们关于如何打造一支多元化的劳动力队伍的知识前沿，这支队伍将在总体水平上更有效地运作。因此，它对美国经济和世界经济的产出都有直接影响。对许多组织来说，了解群体动态及其对经济决策和效率的影响具有前所未有的紧迫性。该项目使用一系列实验室实验来研究社会认同如何影响动态群体中的协调与合作。这个项目的结果可以让我们了解个人的身份和群体构成在个人决策中所起的作用，这些决策是为了最大化社会福利，将组织目标置于自我利益之上，并做出更多努力。这项研究的见解有可能对经济学的理论和经验知识有所贡献。首先，我们的工作将为将动态的群体构成纳入我们对经济决策中个人行为的理解提供经验基础。我们通过研究新来者的身份如何影响群体，以及群体的组成如何影响老成员和新来者，来扩大对群体的理解。其次，我们为关于多样性及其对生产力的影响的文献做出贡献。这是一个研究领域，对组织如何设计工作团队以有效地共同运作具有影响。最后，我们的研究将对有关性别行为差异的文献做出贡献。我们在这篇文献中增加了对动态群体性别构成及其对男性和女性表现的影响的理解。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.