Team Faultline Measurement

Team faultline measurement quantifies the hypothetical dividing lines that can split a work group into relatively homogeneous subgroups based on the alignment of several member attributes at once. Dora Lau and Keith Murnighan introduced the faultline concept in 1998, arguing that what matters is not how diverse a group is on any single attribute but how strongly multiple attributes line up to create a clean cleavage — for example, when all the older members are also the men and the engineers, while all the younger members are the women and the marketers. Thatcher, Jehn, and Zanutto operationalized the idea in 2003 with the Fau index of faultline strength and a companion measure of faultline distance, and tested their effects on conflict and performance. Later work by Meyer and Glenz compared the proliferating measures and proposed an average-silhouette-width approach that can handle more than two subgroups. The method turns an intuition about subgroup splits into a reproducible number that can be entered into models of team process and outcomes.