The emergence of interaction and affective-based subgroups in faultlines team: examining the effect of dyadic distances
Carmine Basile, Guido Conaldi, Patrick Reinmoeller
The increasing diversity in the workforce and rising use of temporary groups as an effective way of organizing make group diversity highly relevant to managers. Recent years have witnessed important new developments in groups diversity constructs. Faultlines, “hypothetical dividing lines” that may split an organisational group into subgroups based on the alignment of multiple individual attributes, have been shown to be a powerful explanatory variable for various team-level outcomes. Much of extant research takes a bird’s-eye view of subgroups within teams, seldomly unpacking the intra- and inter-subgroups dynamics. However, Faultlines can be defined as a dyadic, relational measure of distance between each pair of actors in a group based on their multiple diversity attributes. Relying on this measure, in this paper we model the intra-subgroup and inter-subgroup dynamics of multiple organisational teams with respect to communication and affective ties. We use longitudinal data from 48 groups undertaking a strategic business simulation at a UK university and estimate multiple stochastic actor-oriented models (SIENA). By doing so, we uncover the emergence of within-subgroup and across-subgroups local network structures that are influenced by dyadic distances between actors measured across multiple attributes.← Schedule