[2020-15]

The Role of Homophily on Group Structure and Knowledge Diversity

Choi, Ustina Y.S

Moon Soul Graduate School of Future Strategy, KAIST

Yang, Jae-Suk

Moon Soul Graduate School of Future Strategy, KAIST

 ABSTRACT 
Organizations have valued and encouraged fostering workplace diversity to increase innovation and organizational performance through learning processes or knowledge sharing. This paper examines the role of homophily on network structure and organizational learning. We investigated whether homophilous structured groups and/or homophilous learning influences the diversity of knowledge available in an organization.  An agent-based computational analysis wasconducted to observe the difference between diverse (or random) and structured homophilous networks. As well, within the different group structures, we examined two different types of learning, social and homophilous learning, and its effect on knowledge diversity. The results displayed two important findings. First, regardless of groups structure within the network, homophilous learning showed greater knowledge diversity in comparison to a more mutual organizational learning processes. Secondly, random networks had higher greater knowledge than a network with structured homophilous groups after the homophilous learning process.
Keywords: Group structure; knowledge diversity; organizational learning; homophily;