1342: A Meta-Analysis of Workforce Diversity and Productivity: A Test of Underlying Mechanisms (20683)

Workforce diversity provides a firm with access to a wider pool of talent and resources, which can enhance innovation, improve problem solving and increase elaboration. Specifically, the study examined the relationship between workforce diversity attributes of gender, age, ethnicity, and education and how boundary conditions influence the diversity-productivity relationship. This study follows the meta-analysis technique proposed by Grewal, Puccinelli and Monroe, (2018) to analyse a sample of 50 primary studies published between 2003 and 2023 across multiple countries. The procedure used in this study followed two steps. First, the study assessed the main effect of workforce diversity attributes on firm productivity and tested the heterogeneity of the effect sizes across the primary studies used in this research. The second step explored the boundary conditions that explain the source of the heterogeneity in the workforce diversity-productivity relationship. The findings show that workforce diversity attributes - age, gender, education, and ethnicity significantly influence firm productivity, with education diversity having the highest impact. The results also revealed statistically significant moderating effects whereby the relationships between age, education, ethnic diversity, and productivity were contingent on differences in country, industry, and other moderators. However, the impact of gender diversity on organizational productivity did not significantly differ across the various boundary conditions. The results for interaction terms pointed towards a direct, non-contingent relationship between gender diversity and productivity, irrespective of boundary conditions such as country, sector, economic factors, or period. This paper examines the causal patterns of workplace diversity attributes influencing firm productivity and systematically assesses the contextual factors that moderate the relationship and thus, explain the heterogeneity in the diversity-productivity relationship. The findings show that gender gaps are less dependent on external comparative influences than other diversity dynamics relating to age, ethnicity, and other functional attributes. The finding that education diversity has the strongest positive relationship with productivity aligns with CEM tenets regarding cognitive resource diversity and the development of task-relevant perspectives.

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