Social Category Diversity Promotes Premeeting Elaboration: The Role of Relationship Focus
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Loyd_Social category.pdf
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507.61 KB
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Author(s)
Loyd, Denise Lewin
Wang, Cynthia S.
Phillips, Katherine W.
Lount, Robert B.
Date Issued
July 2012
Journal
Organization Science
Publisher
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
Citation
Loyd, Denise Lewin, Cynthia S. Wang, Katherine W. Phillips, and Robert B. Lount. “Social Category Diversity Promotes Premeeting Elaboration: The Role of Relationship Focus.” Organization Science 24, no. 3 (June 2013): 757–772.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
A purported downside of social category diversity is decreased relationship focus (i.e., one’s focus on establishing a positive social bond with a coworker). However, we argue that this lack of relationship focus serves as a central mechanism that improves information processing even prior to interaction and, ultimately, decision-making performance in diverse settings. We introduce the construct of premeeting elaboration (i.e., the extent to which individuals consider their own and others’ perspectives in the anticipation of an interaction) and explore its link with social category diversity and relationship focus. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that when disagreement occurs, social category diversity increases premeeting elaboration, with relationship focus as a central causal mechanism. Experiment 3 shows that premeeting elaboration has important implications for performance: disagreeing dyads with social category diversity elaborate more prior to meeting and, as a result, perform better on a decision-making task than those with social category homogeneity. We discuss the value of studying early-stage interaction and propose a reconsideration of the “downside” of social category diversity.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1120.0761
