Relational Demography: A Three-decade Literature Review

Relational demography focuses on the influence of differences or similarities in demographic characteristics between individuals and others (such as between superiors and subordinates, between individuals and other members of the team) that constitute a mutual relationship in the workplace, on the attitudes and behaviors of the focal individual. As women, minorities and other groups that are traditionally marginalized in the workplace occupy more and more central positions, and the new generation of employees, professionals, and highly-educated people begin to play more and more important roles in the organization, the diversity of employees in the organization is increasing. However, as an important branch of diversification research, relational demography has been ignored by Chinese scholars. This neglect has caused adverse effects both in practice and in theory. In view of this, this study divides the research on relational demography into different stages, draws on the relevant theoretical framework, and systematically organizes the development of the research on relational demography in the past 30 years.Firstly, by reviewing the research on relational demography in the early stage (1989-1999), this article summarizes these studies in terms of concepts, measurements, theories, and boundary conditions, as well as shortcomings. Scholars mainly use the similar attraction framework and social identity theory to explain the influence of relational demography on the outcome, and use Euclidean distance and interaction terms to measure relational demography. There are three main flaws in the early stage: First, the five types of relational demography, such as gender, age, education level, tenure, and race, cannot cover the rich content of demographic characteristics. Second, there is a lack of research on further categorizing these characteristics. Third, the measurements are diverse and inconsistent, making it difficult to dialogue and integrate research conclusions.Secondly, this article summarizes the progress made in the research on relational demography in the past two decades (2000-present), and analyzes how recent research has made up for the shortcomings of the early-stage research. First, the dimension of relational demography is constantly enriched, from shallow to deep demographic characteristics and from dual to ternary relationship, and taking into account the similarity of family background. Second, scholars try to identify the similarities between different relational demography, and then categorize and analyze them. Third, this study integrates different measurements and theories. To use different measurements reasonably and effectively, scholars systematically compare four measurements, analyze the defects of each measurement, and point out their application scope.Finally, this article specifically discusses the future direction of the research on relational demography in terms of concepts and theories, and looks forward to the main development direction in the Chinese context. First, the theory of expanding relational demography will remain the most fruitful direction. Second, the boundary conditions of relational demography have greater possibilities for expansion. Third, the time is introduced into the study of relational demography, which is one of the waves that cannot be ignored in the research of organizational behavior. Fourth, the special demographic phenomenon in the Chinese context provides an opportunity to expand the conceptual extension of the study of relational demography. Fifth, the Chinese context should be the frontier for testing and developing theories related to relational demography.