The social identity and social networks of ethnic minority groups in organizations: a crucial test of distinctiveness theory

Distinctiveness theor posits that patterns of social identit, and friendship are based on y Y nurneric rarity within specific contexts. In ethnically diverse organizations, the theory predicts that members ofthe smaller ethnic group (relative to members of the larger ethnic group) will: (a) tend to identify and form friendships within their own ethnic group, and (b) lack access to well-connected individuals in the network of friendship relations. Prior tests have supported these predictions, but they have been unable to rule out the possibility that it was chronic differences in social status and numeric representation in society at large (rather than numeric distinctiveness within specific contexts) that explained the observed patterns ofsocial identity and fricndship. In this field-based study, we examined an organization whose social cornposition effectively controlled for these confounds. We found that members of the smaller ethnic group tc-nded to identify and form friendships within group, as predicted by distinctiveness theory. However, in contrast to previous work, we found that members of the smaller ethnic group were equally miell connected to the center of the friendship network as were the members of the larger ethnic group. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons. Ltd.