Birds, Birds, Birds: Co‐Worker Similarity, Workplace Diversity and Job Switches

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12509
Published date01 September 2020
AuthorBoris Hirsch,Elke J. Jahn,Thomas Zwick
Date01 September 2020
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12509
58:3 September 2020 0007–1080 pp. 690–718
Birds, Birds, Birds: Co-Worker Similarity,
Workplace Diversity and Job Switches
Boris Hirsch, Elke J. Jahn and Thomas Zwick
Abstract
We investigate how the demographic composition of the workforce along the
sex, nationality, education, age and tenure dimensions aects job switches.
Fitting duration models for workers’ job-to-job turnover rate that control for
workplace fixed eects in a representative sample of large manufacturing plants
in Germany during 1975–2016, we find that largerco-worker similarity in all five
dimensions substantially depressesjob-to-job moves, whereas workplacediversity
is of limited importance. In line with conventional wisdom, which has that birds
of a feather flock together, our interpretation of the results is that workers prefer
having co-workers of their kind and place less value on diverse workplaces.
1. Introduction
Empirical analyses of job mobility are at the heart of labour economics.
Studies are legion that investigate which worker and which employer
characteristics, such as workers’ sex, age and education as well as firm size
and industry (e.g. Anderson and Meyer 1994; Frederiksen 2008; Grieth
et al. 2000; Royalty 1998), drive worker turnover. Yet, up to now, little
is known on how the demographic composition of the workforce along
key dimensions, such as sex, nationality, education, age and tenure, aects
individual workers’job switches. In other words,we lack evidence on workers’
revealed preferences about workforce demography, specifically on whether
workers value demographically diverse work environments and/or prefer
having co-workers of their kind.
To be sure, there exists a broad management literature on the turnover
eect of what has been termed ‘organizational demography’ (Pfeer 1985)
Boris Hirsch is at Leuphana University of L¨
uneburg, Halle Institute for Economic Research
(IWH) and IZA Institute of Labor Economics. Elke J. Jahn is at the Institute for Employment
Research (IAB), Universityof Bayreuth, and IZA Institute of Labor Economics. Thomas Zwick
is at the University of W¨
urzburg, Centre for EuropeanEconomic Research (ZEW) Mannheim,
and Research Centre forEducation and the Labour Market (ROA)Maastricht.
C
2019 The Authors.British Journal of Industrial Relations published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits
use, distributionand reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properlycited.
Co-worker Similarity, Workplace Diversity and Job Switches 691
that documents lower turnover in demographically more homogenous work
environments (see the surveys by Joshi et al. 2011; Williams and O’Reilly
1998). Moreover, turnover and especially worker-initiated voluntary turnover
have been shown to harm firm performance (Park and Shaw 2013), so
that ‘wrong’ workforce demography poses a possible threat to a firm’s
competitiveness. Usually, though, evidence on the influence of workforce
demography on turnover comes from the laboratory or from small-scale field
studies. One strand of contributions in the management literature considers
how the demographic composition of teams aects team members’ turnover,
and these papers thus refer to very specific settings that render external
validity questionable. Another strand of management papers consists of
observational studies that aim atmore general conclusions. These papers lack
a credible research design in that data constraints prevent them from moving
beyond mere correlations between workforce demography and turnover to
causal eects.1In contrast, our article uses a large sample of workplaces
and follows demographic changes and retention over several decades in these
workplaces. It therefore contributes to the management literature on the
eects of demographyon turnover by providinga causal identification strategy
for a broad set of employers.
Apart from these limitations in terms of internal and external validity,
existing studies only examine single aspects of workforce demography. When
it comes to measuring workforce demography, most studies thus ignore
that it encompasses two related, yet distinct, components: overall workplace
diversity and co-worker similarity at the workplace level from an individual
worker’s perspective. At the aggregate level of the workplace, the workforce
may be more or less diverse, for example, along the age dimension with either
a lot or just a little variation in workers’ age. Yet at the same time, from an
individual worker’s perspective, he or she mayhave more or less same-age co-
workers for any given level of age diversity at the workplace. Hence, whereas
workplace diversity reflects the variation of a demographic characteristic in
the entire workforce, co-worker similarity capturedby the share of co-workers
with the same characteristic mirrors the abundanceof demographically similar
co-workers there from an individual worker’s perspective. Consequently, co-
workersimilarity is a distinct deter minant of job switcheson top of workplace
diversity if workers preferhaving co-workers of their kind, which is suggested
by many analyses.
In this article, we move beyond the extant literature by investigating the
impact of both workplace diversity and co-worker similarity on job switches
along many dierent demographic dimensions for a large representative set
of plants, that is, single production sites or workplaces, in the West German
manufacturing industry. Our unique data contain information on more than
3,000,000 full-time jobs in almost 1,800 large workplaces overan observation
window spanning the years 1975–2016 and thus more than four decades. The
data allow us to examine in detail how workplace diversity and co-worker
similarity along the sex, nationality, education, age and tenure dimension
aect job switches based on duration models forworkers’ job-to-job turnover
C
2019 The Authors.British Journal of Industrial Relations published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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