Influence of task-related diversity of R&D employees on the development of organisational innovations: a gender perspective

Abstract

[EN] The paper aims to analyse the influence of workforce diversity on the likelihood that the firm will develop organisational innovations. Operationalising human resources diversity is not straightforward and the effect of such diversity has been rather overlooked in the context of non-technological innovations. We analyse the impact of task-related diversity among workers in an R&D unit and, in particular, the diversity among the women R&D workers. We employ a GLM with a binomial family and log-log extension to estimate the impact of task-related diversity on firm’s propensity to undertake organisational innovation. GLM is used to control for problems of over-dispersion, which, in models with a binary response variable, could generate erroneous standard errors estimates and provide inconsistent results. We provide three important results. First, employee diversity increases the firm’s propensity to engage in organisational innovations. Second, the influence of each facet of task-related diversity varies depending on the type of organisational innovation considered. Third, gender has an effect on the innovation process. We show that women play different roles in the production of non-technological innovations. The paper contributes to the literature in several ways. First, it makes a theoretical contribution to innovation management research by considering the influence of human resources diversity on the development of non-technological innovations. Second, we analyse the role of workforce diversity in the context of the R&D department, where the contribution of females has not been clearly defined.