Network functional diversity

In the social network literature, network diversity refers to the extent to which an individual’s network connects them to heterogeneous others (Burt, Minor, & Alba, 1983).

Diversity has been defined from a social categorization perspective (Turner & Oakes, 1989) as “any attribute that people use to tell themselves that another person is different” (Williams & O’Reilly, 1998, p. 81). More specifically, unlike demographic diversity which focuses on differences based on individuals’ personal characteristics such as age, gender, and race, functional diversity in the workplace refers to differences among people based on their roles and/or responsibilities (Northcraft, Polzer, Neale, & Kramer, 1996). This is synonymous with functional heterogeneity, defined as “the diversity of

organizational roles embodied in the team” (Jackson, 1992, p. 353). The functional perspective on diversity is particularly relevant to the context of hospital organizations which require numerous healthcare professionals and other types of employees to work together. Therefore, the current study adopts this perspective, defining network diversity as the extent to which a nurse’s workplace social network connects them to other

employees in heterogeneous occupational roles.

Diversity at work has been conceptualized as both an advantage and a

disadvantage within organizations. For example, Burt’s (1992) theory of structural holes postulated that having a broad, diverse network with low information redundancy provides greater social capital than a close homogenous network of overlapping ties. It has also been demonstrated that team diversity leads to greater innovation and better decision making because it brings together different points of view (Williams & O’Reilly, 1998). Participative leadership and providing opportunities to constructively harness diversity (Simons, Pelled, & Smith, 1999) seem to be important conditions for diversity to positively affect team performance. In healthcare, the potential benefits of functional

diversity are becoming apparent (Mitchell, Parker. Giles, & White, 2010), resulting in an increased focus on interprofessional models of care which attempt to bring together a diverse network of healthcare professionals to provide holistic, patient-centered care (Deneckere et al., 2013). Thus, functional diversity within nurses’ workplace social networks may provide them with new insights and perspectives that encourage open dialogue, shared cognitive understandings, and shared language among team members.

However, different ideas and ways of thinking also bring the potential for conflict and complexity that may make sharing and collaboration challenging. For example, Miller et al. (2008) discovered that nurses found interprofessional collaboration difficult when they felt that their colleagues in other professions did not value caring and

emotional work in the same way that they did. In a study of academic researcher teams, Cummings et al. (2013) found that team heterogeneity moderated the relationship between team size and productivity. Their results showed that larger groups were more productive than smaller ones but that increased group diversity in terms of the number of academic disciplines or number of institutions had a dampening effect, suggesting that diversity increases the costs of working with others. Furthermore, close-knit, homogenous networks have been found to be beneficial in cooperative contexts when interdependency is high (Podolny & Baron, 1997). Thus, current evidence about the effects of functional diversity in teams is mixed.

Although diversity certainly brings challenges, from a social capital perspective there may be significant advantages of having positive working relationships with employees who occupy a wide range of roles within one’s organization. Nurses may

benefit from these relationships in different ways. For example, developing relationships with organizational leaders can help nurses accomplish their daily work and achieve personal career goals. Through their conversations with higher-ups they may be more aware of upcoming job vacancies or professional development opportunities, be able to exert informal influence over decisions, or learn how to overcome bureaucratic

constraints more effectively. Nurses who develop positive relationships with other healthcare professionals on their unit may benefit from increased knowledge sharing and gain status by establishing professional credibility through these work relationships.

Nurses may also benefit from developing good working relationships with employees who have non-professional roles within their healthcare organization. Nurses who are able to build positive relationships with unit clerks, custodial staff, and personal support workers may benefit from increased cooperation and support with their day-to- day work. For example, if a nurse has a particularly heavy patient load, a personal support worker may offer to help set up an extra patient in the morning even though it is not officially their responsibility. Likewise, nurses are likely to offer help and assistance to others that they have good working relationships with when asked and are more likely to be approached when help is required.

In the current study, network functional diversity was operationalized as the number of different types of employees within one’s workplace social network (“State the number of important relationships you have at work with people in each of the following positions: Senior management; Physician; Nurse Practitioner..., Unit Clerk, etc.”). Higher scores indicate greater functional diversity than lower scores. This measurement approach

has not been used to measure structural social capital in the workplace but it is similar to how group heterogeneity was measured by Cummings et al. (2013) in their study of academic researchers where the number of disciplines of PIs and the number of institutions were used, lending empirical support for this approach.