This article investigates the relationships of culture strength and two substantive cultural values with corporate performance. Culture strength is measured by the consistency of responses to survey items across people and the two cultural values are measured by items on the survey that relate to either adaptability or stability. The data, from management surveys of 11 US insurance companies in 1981, were correlated with asset and premium grow,th rates from 1982 to 1987. Results indicate that both a strong culture regardless of content and a substantive value placed on adaptability are associated with better performance for two to three subsequent years on both criterion measures. The results support the findings of Denison (1990) that strength of culture is predictive of short-term performance. The present results, however, suggest a more complex contingency model than that proposed by Denison.

Workforce diversity refers to the composition of work units in terms of the cultural or demographic characteristics that are salient and symbolically meaningful in the relationships among group members. Although generally thought of as the purview of management research, the topic of workforce diversity draws from and is relevant to research from sociology and psychology. In this review, we highlight two issues: (a) the importance of the substantial research on inequality to an adequate understanding of workforce diversity and (b) the need to link discussions of workforce diversity to the structural relationships among groups within the society. We organize the review in terms of three dimensions of the relationships among groups: power, status, and numbers (or composition). We highlight research from sociology, psychology, and management and show similarities and gaps across these fields. We also briefly discuss the outcomes of workforce diversity in the workplace.

This paper examines the influence of the structural positions of different demographic groups in the science and engineering labor force on their access to the allocation of favorable work experiences and their effect on decisions about the evaluation of their performance. Our hypotheses challenge assumptions in the management literature that each group will necessarily express ingroup bias and outgroup derogation. Instead, we call attention to the status hierarchy that develops from status construction processes, the prototypicality that emerges from social categorization processes, and a framework of stereotype content that is based on an analysis of structural positions among groups in the society. Using hierarchical linear modeling with survey data from scientists and engineers in research and development in 24 major corporations, we find that U.S.-born white males, who constitute the normative ingroup, receive advantages in both allocation and evaluation decisions from all evaluators, not just from other white men. We also find that normative outgroups (non-male, non-whites, and/or non-U.S. born) receive ambivalent or indifferent more than discriminatory or biased treatment, depending on their structural position in relation to U.S.-born white men, and that these effects are independent of who is doing the rating.

Organizations increasingly rely on virtual teams to access geographically dispersed expertise. Yet, team dispersion introduces challenges to team communication that may negatively influence team performance. Using a sample of 53 innovation teams representing a variety of geographic dispersion configurations from completely collocated to highly dispersed, we examined the moderating role of transformational leadership on the relationship between team dispersion, team communication, and team performance. Our findings suggest that while transformational leadership is effective in reducing the negative effects of dispersion in collocated teams or ones with low levels of geographic dispersion, it is less effective helping improve the performance of highly dispersed teams. This effect may be due to a transformational leader's difficulty in facilitating team communication in highly dispersed teams, where his or her influence might actually have counterproductive effects. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory, future research, and practice.

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