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Loosely translated, homophily is your desire and ability to gravitate towards like-minded individuals. A lot of people would think this is a very good/strong element of business and work and organizations and workplaces, because — like-minded people tend to be potential choices for work friends, and having friends at work can be a pretty powerful thing. Plus, we’ve been talking a lot about employee engagement, employee advocacy and overall organizational culture for a number of years. Put aside the potential idea that it’s a consultant-driven scam. If you believe in it, isn’t a stronger culture — one with a lot of like-minded, goal-focused, supporting-each-other individuals — the exact thing you want?
Well, probably not.
I’ve written a little about this before:
From a cliche alert standpoint, this all goes back to “variety is the spice of life.”
We can phrase this in a more academic way, though. What happens when a bunch of Northwestern (Kellogg) researchers dive into this topic and try to figure out whether a strong, like-minded culture is good or bad? Here’s what happens:
But Kets and Sandroni found that homophily may not benefit all types…
