Archive Detail

Speaker:
Florian Kunze (University of Konstanz)

This event is part of an event series „Kolloquium Management and Public Administration“.

Florian Kunze (University of Konstanz):

"More Than Meets the Eye: The Critical Role of Migrant Status and Language for Social Identity Effects"

Abstract:
The number of migrants worldwide has grown rapidly in recent years and their integration poses challenges for organizations and societies. Questions of differences in terms of migration, nationality, and cultural background have come to the fore in many countries. In line with its recent surge in public attention and importance, we investigate the effects of in/congruence in terms of migration background, a currently understudied phenomenon. We highlight the importance of language differences for the relational demography literature and show its relevance for organizations by illustrating its impact on customer incivility and employee turnover. We do so utilizing a mixed-method, multi-study approach. First, in objective and time-lagged field data from 14,327 employees nested in 737 delivery units of a large Swiss logistics firm, we find that higher numbers of migrants in service units do not directly impact the amount of customer complaints. However, we find a moderation effect of the number of migrants in the customer base served by the service teams. Incongruence between the number of migrants in the unit and the customer base leads to more complaints for similar performance. Such unfair customer complaints can hurt organizations twice, because they also lead to increased voluntary unit turnover. Second, in an experimental study, we identify the theoretical mechanism by using audio vignettes. We show that alternative explanations for service mistakes are less credible when spoken in accented language. These results highlight the crucial role of language for relational demography research and provide important insights for organizations and societies.