The Effect of Gender and Racial Diversity on Collective Turnover

Abstract

We draw on insights from the social identity theory to answer two important questions: does gender and racial diversity influence collective employee turnover in organizations? If so, can an organization's experience with a pro-diversity climate attenuate these relationships? Drawing on the U.K. higher education sector as the empirical context, we demonstrate that greater gender and racial diversity has a positive association with collective turnover. At the same time, more experience with pro-gender diversity practices moderates this association so that this experience reduces collective turnover due to gender diversity in more gender-diverse organizations, while its effect is found to be opposite in less gender-diverse organizations. We detect no similar effect for an organization's experience with pro-racial diversity practices.