The demographic faultline is a new situational factor for team management: The effect of leader teamwork behaviors on support for innovation

Abstract

An alternative method for team diversity studies is to examine demographic faultlines. A concept of demographic faultline enables us to better understand team dynamics with multidimensional diversity. This study suggests the demographic faultline as a new situational factorto influence the relationship between leader teamwork behaviors and a climate of support for innovation. When subgroups divided by demographic faultline are homogeneous within them and heterogeneous between them, the homogeneity may increase intimacy in each subgroup while the heterogeneity may increase exclusiveness between those subgroups. We argued that a leader could play an important role to build a cooperative relationship between faultline-based subgroups and highlight positive aspects of developing and maintaining subgroups in organizations. With a sample of 81 teams (558 employees), it was examined how leader teamwork behaviors would affect a team-level climate of support for innovation and how this relationship would be moderated by each team's demographic faultline (gender, age, and educational specialty). As predicted, it was found that there was a significant positive relationship between each leader's teamwork behaviors and each team's climate of support for innovation. In addition, this relationship was stronger for teams with strong faultline than with weak faultline. Our findings and their implications were further discussed.