Diversity in Organizations: Employing Agent-Based Computational Econo...

Diversity in organizations is a highlytopical, cross-disciplinary field of research which self-evidently requires toconsider heterogeneous interacting agents. This makes agent-based computationaleconomics a promising, though, so far, rarely employed research perspective forstudying diversity in organizations. Against this background the paper employsan agent-based simulation based on the framework of NK-fitness landscapes tostudy the effects of different types of workplace diversity on organizationalperformance. The results provide neither universal support for beneficial nordetrimental effects of diversity; rather they suggest that non-trivialinterrelations among different attributes of workplace diversity exist whichare moderated by task complexity.