How does team diversity relate to the willingness to collaborate with asylum seekers? It depends on the diversity dimensions investigated and boundary conditions.

Abstract

The successful integration of asylum seekers into the labor market is among the most pressing issues of refugee-receiving countries. We construe co-workers’ willingness to collaborate with asylum seekers as a crucial factor for integration and investigate its antecedents. Linking Allport’s contact theory with team diversity theories, we propose that a work team’s diversity affects team members’ willingness to collaborate with asylum seekers. We thus investigated the effects of different facets of objective (national, migration background, age, and gender) and perceived diversity in work teams on team members’ willingness to collaborate with asylum seekers. In doing so, we also tested whether asylum seekers’ status in the team hierarchy (superior vs. colleague), task interdependence, and pro-diversity team norms moderate these effects. Multi-level regression analyses based on 470 participants nested in 106 teams showed that, overall, team diversity played a small role in explaining the willingness to collaborate with asylum seekers. Age diversity was negatively associated with the willingness to collaborate with asylum seekers, especially when asylum seekers were considered to take a post as a superior rather than a colleague. In teams with high task interdependence, migration background diversity and willingness to collaborate with asylum seekers were positively associated. Pro-diversity norms did not moderate team diversity effects. Overall, our findings demonstrate that team diversity can have beneficial, harmful, and no substantial consequences for the willingness to work with asylum seekers, depending on the considered type of diversity and boundary conditions.