Realizing the Performance Benefits of Workforce Diversity in the U.S. Federal Government: The Moderating Role of Diversity Climate

• DOI: 10.1177/0091026019848458
• Date: 01 March 2020
• Author: Robert K. Christensen,Kuk-Kyoung Moon
• Published date: 01 March 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0091026019848458

Public Personnel Management

2020, Vol. 49(1) 141 –165

© The Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/0091026019848458

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Article

Realizing the Performance

Benefits of Workforce

Diversity in the U.S. Federal

Government: The Moderating

Role of Diversity Climate

Kuk-Kyoung Moon1 and Robert K. Christensen2

Abstract

Conventional wisdom in diversity research holds that biodemographic diversity is harmful

to performance, whereas job-related diversity is beneficial to performance. Empirical

evidence in this area, however, remains mixed and inconclusive. Due to this inconsistency,

scholars have recently called for a search for moderators of the relationship between

diversity and performance to expand the theoretical perspectives on organizational

diversity. In this context, we examine how biodemographic (gender, race, and age) and

job-related (function and tenure) diversity influence organizational performance and

how diversity climate as a potential moderator shapes the relationships between the

two dimensions of diversity and performance. Using panel data from the U.S. federal

government, we find that racial and tenure diversity have positive relationships with

organizational performance, whereas functional diversity has a negative relationship.

Further analysis reveals that a diversity climate positively moderates the relationship

between racial diversity, functional diversity, tenure diversity, and organizational

performance. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Keywords

biodemographic diversity, job-related diversity, organizational performance, diversity

climate

As the degree of employee diversity in governmental organizations continues to rise,

public administration scholars and practitioners have become increasingly interested

1Inha University, Incheon, South Korea

2Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

Corresponding author:

Kuk-Kyoung Moon, Inha University, 100 Inharo, Nam-gu Incheon 22212, South Korea.

Email: kkmoon@inha.ac.kr

848458PPMXXX10.1177/0091026019848458Public Personnel ManagementMoon and Christensen

research-article2019

142 Public Personnel Management 49(1)

in the characteristics of the workforce composition that affect work-related outcomes

(Choi, 2011; Choi & Rainey, 2014; Pitts & Wise, 2010; Sabharwal, Levine, &

D’Agostino, 2018). Of particular interest is how demographic diversity is related to

organizational performance (Choi & Rainey, 2010; Opstrup & Villadsen, 2015; Pitts,

2005; Pitts & Jarry, 2009). For instance, based on social categorization theory (SCT),

scholars assume that workforce diversity is harmful to performance because of severe

relational conflicts stemming from dissimilarities among employees (Pitts, 2010; Pitts

& Towne, 2015). In contrast, building on information/decision-making theory (IDT),

it has been argued that diversity can be a human capital resource of divergent perspec-

tives that improves decision quality and performance (Pitts, 2010; Pitts & Towne,

2015).

Although the two competing diversity theories are intuitively compelling, there is

mixed evidence on the relationship between organizational diversity and performance

in the literature. In fact, given that diversity is often described as “double-edged

sword” (Milliken & Martins, 1996, p. 402), it is not surprising that organizational

diversity has no consistent main effects on performance (Horwitz & Horwitz, 2007;

Williams & O’Reilly, 1998). Due to these mixed results, van Knippenberg, De Dreu,

and Homan (2004) pointed out that a large body of diversity research has somewhat

oversimplified the underlying mechanism by which various types of diversity shape

organizational performance and largely ignored contextual factors that potentially

affect the strength and direction of the relationship between diversity and performance.

Similarly, some scholars have contended that more interest should be directed toward

exploring what conditions moderate the effects of diversity to reconcile the two oppos-

ing viewpoints (Horwitz & Horwitz, 2007; Joshi & Roh, 2009; Pitts & Towne, 2015).

In response to these recent calls, we explore the relationships between two dimen-

sions of diversity—biodemographic and job-related diversity—and organizational

performance and the moderating role of diversity climate in relationships in U.S. fed-

eral agencies. In so doing, our study attempts to extend the previous diversity research

in two distinct ways. First, this study advances our understanding of diversity’s effects

on performance by examining job-related diversity other than the biodemographic

diversity on which most public administration research has exclusively focused in past

decades. Somewhat surprisingly, while public administration scholars have focused

primarily on the impacts of observable biological characteristics, such as gender, race,

and age, on performance, the impacts of unobservable job-related attributes, such as

functional background and tenure status, remain underexplored in the literature (Pitts

& Wise, 2010). Given that (nearly) every organization possesses dissimilarity in both

biodemographic characteristics job-related characteristics, insufficient interest in bio-

demographic diversity may prevent us from fully understanding diversity’s effects on

performance (Pitts & Towne, 2015; Pitts & Wise, 2010). Second, this study contrib-

utes to our understanding of how diversity climate (i.e., employees’ shared positive

perceptions about an organization’s diversity management practices) harvests the

positive effects of diversity while alleviating its negative implications in the U.S. fed-

eral government. The presence or absence of a supportive diversity climate is one of

the conditions that may be particularly important to the consequences of