Leader-versus-member and fair-versus-biased categorisations as safeguards against negative effects of demographic diversity on group attraction

Over the years, there has been an increase in participation by the underrepresented sections of the society in the workforce. Consequently, people within organisations nowadays differ markedly in visible attributes of age, language, race, religion, and sex. One negative consequence of such demographic diversity is that people categorise similar others as in-group (us) but dissimilar others as out-group (them), and hence prefer the former over the latter. Two controlled laboratory experiments guided by information integration theory and social identity theory were conducted to investigate how leadership and fairness safeguard against possible negative effects of racial diversity on group attraction among Singaporeans. In Experiment 1, the leader’s race was crossed with the team member’s race. As predicted, the leader categorisation had a stronger effect than the member categorisation, and group attraction was driven by both the in-group preference and the out-group derogation. In Experiment 2, the leader reputation as fair versus biased was also manipulated.

As predicted, racial differences among members did not influence group attraction, but the fair reputation of the leader reduced the difference between the in-group and out-group leader by race much more than the leader’s biased reputation did. Findings illustrate operation of positive social identity considerations due to racial diversity in teams. More important, they show that the leadership and fairness categorisations can be effective safeguards against negative consequences of racial diversity for group attraction in modern organisations that aspire to be fair and transparent.