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Assigning migrants to customer contact jobs: a context-specific exploration of the business case for diversity

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Abstract

Ethnic diversity of both their labor forces and customer bases presents a challenge for companies and fuels debate on the business case for diversity: the view that diversity positively impacts firm performance. This study enriches the business case debate by focusing on a particular organizational activity, customer contact. It combines theory from strategic human resource management (SHRM), research on diversity, and research on marketing to analyze what drives companies to assign migrants to customer contact jobs and which performance impacts ensue. We test our hypotheses in data from 338 German business companies. Companies that recognize the value in ethnic diversity and seek to respond to customer diversity are especially likely to assign migrants to customer contact jobs. The analyses reveal a positive impact of migrants in customer contact jobs on company profitability. This impact is enhanced by a broad range of equality and diversity practices and a supportive works council. These moderators have stronger effects than two other moderators related to business strategy: the market served by a company, and its competitive strategy. The paper contributes to SHRM research in general and diversity research in particular through its original examination associating the business case for ethnic diversity with the role of equality and diversity practices and institutions. The study findings can help managers to decide whether to leverage staff ethnic diversity and show that collaboration between HR management and marketing functions is useful to achieve a strategic fit among practices.

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Notes

  1. Although we did not collect the data on our own, we are very convinced that their quality is very high. The media and social research firm we commissioned is a leading institution in this field. It has a high reputation and its conduct of field work is certified according to the international quality norms ISO 9001 and ISO 20252. In addition, a personal visit of one of the firm’s call centers where we observed the interviewers’ high professional skills and the call center’s monitoring facilities as well as comprehensive plausibility checks of the data lead to our assessment of high data quality.

  2. In addition to the 338 companies considered in the analysis of Hypothesis 2, we used the information of the 160 companies that did not employ migrants at all to enlarge the data basis. These companies have an average profitability of 0.50 (to aid in interpretation: the value 0 means “in the last 3 years, returns equaled expenses”, 1 means “returns were higher than expenses”). They outperform companies that employ migrants but do not assign them to customer contact jobs (average profitability = 0.46) but perform worse than companies that (employ migrants and) assign migrants to customer contact jobs (average profitability = 0.61). The grand mean profitability of companies that do not assign migrants to customer contact jobs equals 0.48. Further analyses on the basis of the larger data set yielded similar results to those based on the selected data set. Since considering the additional 160 companies did not significantly improve model estimations and the information of the larger data set is not appropriate for analyses of Hypotheses 1, 2c, and 2d in the following we concentrate on the selected data set.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on previous versions of this article. Renate Ortlieb and Barbara Sieben thank Tanja Rabl for constructive feedback, the participants of the 2012 Academy of Management Meeting’s paper session “Diversity Management” for inspiring discussions and the European Social Fund for granting the research project from which this article originates.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Human Resource Management, School of Business and Economic Sciences, University of Graz, Elisabethstr. 50b, 8010, Graz, Austria

    Renate Ortlieb

  2. Department of Management, School of Business and Economics, Freie Universität Berlin, Boltzmannstr. 20, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Barbara Sieben

  3. Department of Business Administration, Chair of International Marketing, University of Vienna, Brünner Str. 72, 1210, Wien, Austria

    Christina Sichtmann

Authors
  1. Renate Ortlieb
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  2. Barbara Sieben
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  3. Christina Sichtmann
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Correspondence to Renate Ortlieb.

Additional information

Renate Ortlieb and Barbara Sieben jointly function as first authors of this article. Christina Sichtmann contributed the marketing perspective to the paper’s conceptual part and was involved in the empirical analyses.

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Ortlieb, R., Sieben, B. & Sichtmann, C. Assigning migrants to customer contact jobs: a context-specific exploration of the business case for diversity. Rev Manag Sci 8, 249–273 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11846-013-0106-4

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