Study on Determinants of Faultlines and Occupational Stress : Empirical Results of a Pilot Study

Objective: Managing people from different backgrounds has brought great benefits to companies, sport teams, and surgical teams. However, previous research has shown that diversity may have negative effects on performance because of diversity “faultlines”, hypothetical dividing lines that may split a group into subgroups. We conducted an empirical study on faultlines for the first time in Japan to investigate the present status of faultlines and to assess the degree to which workers perceive that (certain) attributes (e.g. age, personality, attitude) may have an impact on the emergence of faultlines in Japanese work organizations. Participants: Participants included 132 workers (122 males and 10 females; ages 20-59 years, M=48.1 years SD =±16.2). Methods: The questionnaire consisted of three sections, the first of which was a face sheet. The second was a newly developed set of items designed to assess the degree to which participants perceived that (certain) attributes might have an impact on the emergence of faultlines. The third explored participantʼs perception of faultlines at their present workplace. Results: We found that task-related attributes such as specialty and ability/knowledge were great factors affecting faultlines, and that every participant perceived faultlines based on such attributes as specialty, personality, and attitude. Conclusion: These findings provided the first step towards bridging faultlines in diverse teams. However, they also suggested faultlines are more detrimental than previously thought to individuals as well as organizations. Further research is now being conducted with the cooperation of more than 1,000 participants to examine the relationship between faultlines and individual outcomes, such as occupational stress and work-life conflict.


Introduction
Developed countries are concerned over the decrease in the labor force population.Especially in Japan, with its falling birthrate, aging society and shrinking population, the Japanese economy will remain at a low growth level over the long term.Moreover, because of the rise in the eligibility age for receiving public pension and the number of young people without work, many companies or organizations in Japan have to face the further utilization of various human resources, including women, foreign people, the elderly, and people with disabilities.
The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry states that diversity management is a key strategy for human resources intended as part of management strategies by enterprises to build a competitive advantage.By exhibiting the diverse capabilities of human resources in management, the base for utilization of human resources will be expanded and linked to responses to diverse market needs to make use of various perspectives, and create the innovation that makes use of those differences 1) .
One good example of promotion of diversity management is ANA Holdings Inc.The ANA Group considers itself as a group that truly utilizes diversity and encourages frank discussion and mutual enhancement regardless of race, age, gender, assignment, role values or any other differences, to create a corporate culture that empowers the entire group.In particular, as women make up the majority of employees within ANA, management has made a point of continuously raising utilization of womenʼs varied perspectives, sensibilities and values, and has set numerical targets for such matters as the number of female managers and the ratio of female to male managers (http://www.anahd.co.jp/en/csr/employees/diver sity.html).
The spread of diversity management has been expanding to organizations other than companies.In fact, the participation of women in sports and increasing opportunities for women in decision making and leadership roles have been growing within sports since the Brighton Declaration on Women and Sport (http: //www.sportsbiz.bz/ womensportinternational/conferences/brighton_dec laration.htm),which provides the principles guiding actions intended to increase the involvement of women in sports at all levels and in all functions and roles.Meanwhile in the medical field, team medical care has received increasing attention, which stands together with regard to the treatment of patients, respecting each otherʼ s professional specialties, and continually working to improve their specialist skills in order to provide the best medical care that will satisfy patients (http://www.jira-net.or.jp/radiology_japan/rj_065/02.html).

Diversity as a double edged sword
In the past 40 years research on diversity management has been conducted to examine the complex relationship between diversity and performance.However, the actual findings on the effects of diversity on performance have been relatively inconsistent (Williams & Oʼ Reilly, 1998) 2) .Some studies have found diversity to positively relate to performance, while other studies have found a negative relationship between diversity and organizational outcomes such as late delivery, inadequate productivity, inability to produce innovative results.As portrayed by Milliken & Martins (1996) 3) , diversity is a double-edged sword with both positive and negative aspects.
Horwitz & Irwin (2007) 4) suggested several key implications drawn from their meta-analytic endeavor.First, task-related diversity is found to be positively related to both quality and quantity of team performance, while demographic diversity is not significantly related to team performance.On the contrary, the demographic dimensions of diversity may be more likely to be negatively related to performance (Horwitz & Horwitz, 2007;  Joshi & Roh, 2009) 4) 5) .

Types of diversity
Taxonomy for describing the types of diversity by West et al., (2003) is shown in Table -1 6) .The columns in Table-1 differentiate between relationship-oriented and task-related diversity.Pelled (1996) 7) proposed this categorization based on the relatedness between attributes and task.Joshi & Jackson (2010) 8) later categorized attributes highly related to job as task-related and those less related to job as relation-oriented.
According to Joshi & Jackson (2010) 8) , taskoriented diversity refers to the distribution of attributes that are potentially relevant to team work.Organizational tenure, formal credentials and titles, and cognitive abilities are examples of taskoriented diversity.Relation-oriented diversity refers to the distribution of attributes that are instrumental in shaping interpersonal relationships but which typically have no apparent direct implications for task performance; age, gender and personality characteristics are examples of relationships-oriented diversity.In the past ten years, relation-oriented and surface level diversity were collectively known as demographic diversity.
The rows in Table-1 differentiate between readilydetected or surface-level diversity and underlying or deep-level diversity.Taniguchi (2005) 9) explained that surface-level diversity is that which is easily observable or detectable.Age, sex, and ethnicity are examples of surface-level diversity.Deep-level diversity refers to differences among team members on attributes that generally become known only through interaction, such as personality, attitudes, and skills (Joshi & Jackson, 2010) 8) .

Fautlines theory
Previous studies have tried to clarify why some diverse teams contribute to organizations, and some do not.Lau & Murnighan (1998) 10) proposed the term faultlines refer to hypothetical dividing lines that may split a group into subgroups based on one or more attributes.Faultline theory explains how the combination and configuration of the attributes of team members can influence the teamʼs behavior and ultimately its performance.The attributes that drive faultlines can be surface-level or deep-level (Gratton et al., 2007) 11) .See "Figure -1".
Previous studies have also showed a significant negative relationship between faultlines and organizational outcomes such as conflict, miscommunication among members, and turnover.Earley & Mosakowski (2000) 12) reported that faultlines based on nationality harm team identity, group efficacy, team performance, and satisfaction with teamʼs performance.Molleman (2005) 13) indicated that demographic faultlines directly impair the functioning of a team.Rico et al., (2007) 14) examined the effects of diversity faultlines stemming from educational background and conscientiousness on team decision quality and social integration and the moderating role of team task autonomy.They found the negative effects of faultlines on performance and social integration.
Jehn & Bezrukova (2010) 15) showed that groups with activated faultlines (members actually perceive subgroups based on the demographic charac-teristics) are more likely to form coalitions, have high levels of group conflict, and lower levels of satisfaction and group performance than dormant faultline groups.
However, few previous studies have mentioned individual outcomes such as stress and work-life conflict.Strong faultlines can create a fracture in the social fabric of the group.This fracture may become a source of tension and a barrier to the creation of trust, which may be factors having a negative impact on individuals.Therefore we have begun examining the relationship between the individualsʼ perception of faultlines in the workplace.We addressed two research questions in our faultlines study.The first of these was to investigate the present status of faultlines and to explore which attributes will create faultlines in the Japanese workplace (RQ1).The second research question was to assess the relationship between the perception of faultlines, of and occupational stress and work-life conflict (RQ2).Both of them have yet to be empirically investigated in Japan.Most previous studies have mainly been conducted in Europe and America where cultural backgrounds are quite different from Japan.For instance, in general, Japan is a country that has only one race and many Japanese workers associate the term "diversity" with womenʼ s participation and empowerment in work organizations.
The ultimate purpose of our research on faultlines is to clarify RQ1 and RQ2.In this paper, we described results of RQ1 for exploring attributes which greatly affected the emergence of faultlines and assessing the degree to which Japanese workers perceived that attributes might have an impact on the emergence of faultlines.

Measures
The questionnaire consisted of three sections, the first of which was a face sheet (e. g. gender, age, place of residence, married status, tenure, family composition, industry, occupation, size of organizations/enterprises, tenure, position, average working hours per day, employment status).The second section was a newly developed set of items designed to assess the degree to which participants perceived that attributes might have an impact on the emergence of faultlines (e.g."How much do you think the differences between generations will affect the emergence of faultlines?"), which was measured with four 4-point Likert questions, anchored from 1 = "Not at all" to 4 = "Extremely

Results
Table-3 displays descriptive statistics in the present status of the emergence of faultlines.Attributes as follow had a high level of impact on the emergence of faultlines; specialty (57.3%), personality (54.2%), attitude (51.9%), ability/ knowledge (48.9%), position (46.9%),most of which were categorized into information/taskrelated attributes.On the other hand, demographic/ relationship-oriented attributes such as race and state of health had a low level of impact on faultlines; race (6.1%), state of health (7.6%), family composition (9.9%), athletic experiences (16.8%).

Discussion
In this study, we have found which attributes will have an impact on the emergence of faultlines, and also clarified the actual situation of faultlines at the worksite for the first time in Japan.The results of this study suggested that task-related and deeper level attributes such as ability/knowledge and personality might have a influence on faultlines.However, this result was different from our hypotheses and the results of some previous research on faultlines.Most previous studies have shown that demographic attributes are likely to have an influence on faultlines.The result in this study might result from the bias that most of Japanese participants have not faced demographic diversity (i.e.diversity in nationality, ethnicity, race, religion and sexual orientation and so on).

Table - 1
A scheme for categorizing the personal attributes of individuals

Table - 3
The status of the emergence of faultlines Figure-2 The impact of attributes on faultlines