A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WORKFORCE DIVERSITY AND INNOVATION

Abstract

The relationship between workforce diversity and innovation has recently come to the attention of researchers, numerous studies focusing on the causal relationship between the two terms, but none of them having investigated the specialized literature pertaining to this relationship from a bibliometric perspective. The aim of this paper is to use a bibliometric analysis in order to highlight the way the link between these two concepts evolves within the scientific field. In this sense, 366 Web of Science indexed publications on this topic were selected and analyzed with the help of two popular software - Biblioshiny and VOSviewer. The results highlighted the evolution of academic production on the link between workforce diversity and innovation, their territorial dissemination based on the most productive countries, the collaboration among three of the most influential channels (affiliations, authors, and sources), and the conceptual structure of the scientific production based on keyword co-occurrence analysis, as well as a longitudinal thematic analysis. This study can contribute to the literature through a map of the relationship between workforce diversity and innovation. Its conclusions have led to the idea that employee diversity (in terms of education, ethnicity, race, gender, equity, age) can create all the necessary premises (human capital, knowledge, productivity, cultural diversity, motivation, leadership) for an organization to be innovative and to achieve performance, thus leading to a competitive advantage.