The extent to which employees identify with their work groups can be influenced by demographics. Women working in male-dominated groups, for example, tend to be evaluated negatively by their male peers and have to work harder for similar rewards. That imbalance can affect not only work-group identification but also perceptions of conflict in the workplace.

Yet consider this: in today's increasingly mobile world, people in the same organization may work at different locations and communicate electronically. Do demographic differences also hold sway here, where there is less physical contact?

Prithviraj Chattopadhyay and Elizabeth George of HKUST and their co-author Arthur D. Shulman suggest not. They show that while women in a male-dominated organization report lower rates of work group identification and higher levels of task and emotional conflict when sex dissimilarity in the group is high, this is minimized when group members do not all work in the same location.

"The use of geographically dispersed teams is increasing and the lack of any influence of sex dissimilarity on work group identification and task and emotional conflict may be an unexpected benefit to balance the problems associated with identification and interaction in distributive work groups," they say.

The authors study 101 research scientists in a public sector organization in Australia, in which 94 per cent work in a group with a male majority and 45 per cent work in the same location (co-located). They focus on three questions: the extent to which individual employees identify with their work groups, the perceived levels of task conflict (disagreements among group members over task issues) and emotional conflict (interpersonal clashes between members), and whether these results are influenced by being in a co-located or a distributive group.

They find men are less likely to believe employee sex is associated with achieving outcomes (scoring a mean of 2.1 on a 7-point scale, where 1 equals strongly disagree and 7 strongly agree, against a mean of 3.2 for women). Employees in distributive work groups are less likely to express this belief than those in co-located, scoring 2.1 against 2.9. And men and women do not differ much on this in distributive groups (2.1 against 2.4) but do in co-located groups (2.2 against 3.4).

Women are more negatively influenced by sex dissimilarity than men in terms of work group identification, and report more emotional and task conflict than men when they are in co-located groups. Interestingly, sex dissimilarity has the opposite effect on men when they work with greater numbers of women.

"This is consistent with our observations that women in these units were in a lower-status category than men. Men may have to argue more about their tasks with other men as each set of arguments would be accorded equal status. If they find it easy to brush aside task-related arguments made by women, they would perceive lower task conflict in more diverse work groups," the authors say.

The results support the idea that for women, sex dissimilarity heightens the extent to which they are categorized by their sex and the lower status conferred on their sex. "The more men they have to work with, the lower their perceptions of belonging to the work group and the higher their perceived levels of conflict," the authors say.

Managers should recognize the effect of sex dissimilarity, in particular in co-located work groups. By understanding how organizational context shapes the way that employees are categorized according to their sex, managers may be able to take action to reduce such categorization, the authors conclude.