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

经济学博士论文研究：群体多样性如何影响新人和群体的合作与协调

• 批准号: 2215203
• 负责人: Sherry Li
• 金额: $ 2.05万
• 依托单位: University of Arkansas
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-07-15 至 2024-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2215203&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Economics; How

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.

技术的进步、文化规范的变化以及机会的扩大使得美国劳动力队伍更加多元化，小型团队已成为组织完成任务和实现目标的不可或缺的一部分，许多工作团队的组成充满活力，经常会增加新成员。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有限，并且无法捕捉现实工作场所中团队动态的流动性，我们的研究通过调查是否以及如何来弥补这一差距。团队，包括新老成员，了解新成员的社会身份如何影响他们的协调和合作，以及旧团队的这些决定与各个级别的组织相关，我们的工作将揭示组织如何更好地整合来自不同背景的新成员。这项研究还拓展了我们关于如何培养多元化劳动力的知识前沿，从而在总体水平上更有效地运作。世界的那个经济。了解群体动态及其对经济决策和效率的影响对许多组织来说是前所未有的紧迫性。该项目使用一系列实验室实验来研究社会身份如何影响动态群体的协调与合作。该项目的结果可以提供信息。我们了解个人身份和群体构成在个人决策中所扮演的角色，以实现社会福利最大化、将组织目标置于个人利益之上以及付出更多努力。这项研究的见解有可能为理论和研究做出贡献。首先，我们的工作将为经济学提供实证基础。将动态群体构成纳入我们对经济决策中个人行为的理解中。我们通过研究新来者的身份如何影响群体以及群体的构成如何影响老成员和新来者来扩展对群体的理解。最后，我们的研究将为有关行为中性别差异的文献做出贡献。动态群体性别构成及其对男性和女性绩效的影响。该奖项通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，NSF 的法定使命被认为值得支持。