Demography and design in an R&D organization

In the research and development (R&D) organization of a firm in a high technology industry, because of the needs for innovative and complex tasks in the rapidly changing environment of technology and market, the design of efficient organization would be one of the most important things. Many researchers have concentrated on the questions: How should teams or unit organizations be organized in terms of demographic diversity? What are the key variables associated with better performance? More technically, should a functional team be formed by the people who have similar experience and tenure, or, alternatively, should it be composed of people with a wide range of demographic characteristics? In this perspective, using the data collected from the 31 project teams and 191 individuals at four corporate-level research and development laboratories at a global electronics company in Korea, this study investigates the impact of demography diversity on project team performance. Particularly, this study moves beyond previous research by broadening the demographic variables to the education characteristics such as major, school, and educational level as a group. The results of the study suggest that, like the other demographic variables, the educational background also is strongly related to the team level performance. While each demographic variable has a certain operating direction, in this unique organization, the more homogeneous team in terms of diversity of school is likely to have better performance through the group process.

Department dc:contributor.department

Management of Technology Program.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2001

Author dc:creator

• Soh, Myung-Jin, 1958-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• M. Diane Burton.

• Management of Technology Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/8919

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/8919