More than meets the eye : The critical role of migrant status for social identity effects

Abstract

The number of migrants worldwide has grown rapidly in recent years and their integration poses challenges such as cultural and language barriers for organizations and societies. Securing and maintaining employment is a key challenge for migrants, yet management research has devoted little attention to migration. We aim to contribute to the emerging literature on this topic by utilizing objective and time-lagged field data from 14,327 mail carriers nested in 737 delivery units of a large Swiss logistics firm. We investigate the link between in/congruence of the number of employees and customers with migration background and customer complaints. Controlling for service quality, we find that congruence between mail carriers and their customers (both low and both high numbers of migrants) is associated with fewer customer complaints, the latter suggesting the existence of a common migrant identity despite national and cultural differences. Surprisingly, we found that it does not matter whether more employees or customers relative to the other group have a migration background, as the results from both incongruence scenarios show increased complaints. We find that units that receive more complaints experience higher rates of voluntary turnover, highlighting how unfair customer complaints can hurt organizations twice, by increasing the risk of loss in both customers and employees.