Journal
SIMULATION MODELLING PRACTICE AND THEORY
Volume 16, Issue 2, Pages 175-191Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.simpat.2007.11.020
Keywords
demographic diversity; demographic faultline; social cohesion; work team; agent-based modeling
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Lau and Murnighan (LM) suggested that strong demographic faultlines threaten team cohesion and reduce consensus. However, it remains unclear which assumptions are exactly needed to derive faultline effects. We propose a formal computational model of the effects of faultlines that uses four elementary social mechanisms, social influence, rejection, homophily and heterophobia. We show that our model is consistent with the central hypotheses of LM's theory. We also find that negative effects of faultlines can be derived even when - unlike LM - we assume that initially there is no correlation between the demographic characteristics and the opinions of team members. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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