Diversity Effects in International Public Administrations: A Perceptual Study

The multinational composition of their staff distinguishes international bureaucracies from their national counterparts. Quite surprisingly, neither scholars in diversity research nor researchers studying international bureaucracies have explored the effect of this geographic diversity. This paper starts to fill this gap by providing a perceptual analysis of the effect of geographic diversity on international bureaucracies’ procedural performance. A perceptual study of diversity effects entails looking at the effect using the perceptions of staff members and is justified by the increasing literature on the importance of perceptions in public management. The empirical findings show that staff members perceive geographic diversity to have a positive effect on performance through two main mechanisms: bias mitigation and the elaboration of task-relevant information. In the second part of the paper, these results are discussed in relation to the identity of international civil servants. The article concludes that the perceived positive effect of diversity on performance can be partly explained by the positive diversity beliefs held by international civil servants.