Abstract
•Globalization has contributed to the formation of diversified teams comprised of people with different characteristics, such as ethnicity, race, gender and other backgrounds, which present new challenges in how we understand and effectively manage teams. As hotels become more diversified, team faultlines will become more common in the workplace.•The study fills in a research gap on team faultlines in hospitality contexts, and empirically tested how the underlying mechanism of team faultlines influences hotel frontline employees’ work engagement by regarding psychological safety as a mediator, using data collected at multiple times.•The study confirmed that inclusive leadership can alleviate the negative impact of team faultlines while facilitating hotel employees’ work engagement. The study provides a more optimistic view that measures can indeed be taken to mitigate the negative impacts of team faultlines, and give certain practical implications for how to effectively manage diversified teams under globalization context.
Team faultlines are hypothetical dividing lines that split a team into two or more subgroups based on individual (diversity) attributes, which negatively influence team process and outcomes. Linking with diversity literature and building on social identity and optimal distinctiveness theories, our study examined a multilevel moderated mediation model on whether, how, and when team faultlines would affect hotel frontline employees’ work engagement using data from 337 Chinese hotel employees nested in 102 work groups, collected at multiple times. The results indicated that team faultlines negatively influenced hotel frontline employees’ work engagement, and that individual perceived psychological safety played a mediating role. Inclusive leadership moderated the indirect relationship between team faultlines and employees’ work engagement via psychological safety, thus providing a more optimistic view that measures can indeed be taken to mitigate the negative impacts of team faultlines.