The Impact Mechanism Of Team Faultlines On Employees’ Performance:A Hierarchical Study

In recent years, team members’composition becomes more diverse. Under the mutual effects of the multiple characteristics of members, team faultlines are formed. Then the managers will meet a new challenge, which is, how to manage team faultlines and apply it effectively. Currently, the related researches mainly focus on the influence of team faultlines on team performance, but few on employees’behavior and performance. In order to complete certain tasks and innovation, an employee usually needs to cooperate with other employees, as well as gains the informational and emotional support from them, and thus, his or her performance is easily influenced by the relationship among team members and the team composition. As the increased attention given on the employees’ performance management and the development of hierarchical analysis, it is necessary and feasible for us to explore the influence of team faultlines on employees’performance.The research aims to comprehensively discuss the hierarchical effect of team faultlines on employees’performance which is based on subgroups theory. Firstly, using the qualitative research method to analysis23interview data, the results show that employees’performance mainly displays in the traditional performance and innovation performance, and team faultlines will affect employees’ performance. And then, having used the hierarchical linear model (HLM), this study empirically examines how do team faultlines influence employees’ performance? Selecting a sample composed of35work teams including559employees in a large manufacturing enterprise located in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, the results show that transactional leadership and team climate strength moderate the relationship between team faultlines and employees’ performance. The negative influence of team faultlines on employees’ performance is stronger for team leader with high transactional leadership, but weaker when team climate strength is high. Team faultlines positively moderates the relationships between social network centrality and employees’performance. When team faultlines are more significant, team member who is at the core of the social network will obtain higher performance. Selecting a sample composed of 26work teams including262employees in a Chinese state-owned media company, the results show that team faultlines positively associated with team member’s innovation performance. Participative climate and leadership empowerment behavior promoted the positive impact. Team faultlines had different moderating effect on the relationship between the individual character and employees’ innovation performance, which show that team falutlines negatively moderate the relationships between felt-responsibility and member’s innovation performance, and positively moderated the relationships between creative self-efficacy and member’s innovation performance. At last, this study also tests the classification effect of team falultlins.The results show that the relation-based faultlines and task-based faultlines have the opposite effect on employees’ traditional performance,but the differences were not found in employees’ innovation performance.This research expands the hierarchical research and classification research of team faultlines, enriches the situational factors, and promotes the development of related theory. Furthermore, it also suggests some practical implications about how to manage employees’performance in those diversified teams.