Team Diversity in European Air Traffic Management Teams: A New Factor Relevant to Safety?

Team diversity refers to all visible and invisible traits which make people unique, leading individuals to the perception that another person is different from themselves (Ely & Thomas, 1996; Van Knippenberg et al., 2004). In a team various diversity category may create hypothetical dividing lines, called faultlines, that split the team into subgroups affecting its cohesion and efficiency (Spoelma & Ellis, 2017; van Knippenberg et al., 2011a; Wegge et al., 2020). Even though team diversity and faultlines influence team’s performance (Martins & Sohn, 2021; van Knippenberg et al., 2011b) they have not yet been well studied in aviation teams even though human factors are found to be a leading cause in aviation accidents (Kelly & Efthymiou, 2019; Kharoufah et al., 2018). This paper aims to investigate the diversity changes in European Air Traffic Management (ATM) teams, identify the most saliant faultlines in ATM teams, and consider diversity relevance to safety climate. To answer the research questions, 28 semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants from 11 European Air Traffic Control (ATC) Centers. Thematic analysis was applied to the transcribed and pseudonymized interviews. The study found that the most saliant faultilines in ATM teams are gender, age, experience, and management. Furthermore, the results showed that while most of the people perceived diversity as relevant to the safety climate of the team, the phenomenon is not reflected yet in ATC work practices neither in team resource management, nor in supervisory training. This paper proposes that further studying of the influence of team diversity on aviation work could contribute to improving safety culture. The qualitative findings should be further tested by quantitative controlled experiments to understand the mechanisms through which diversity may interplay with safety, decision-making and organisational climate in the ATM industry. In addition, given the importance of emotional intelligence on safety (Bates, 2023), this paper calls for further research on ATM teams’ diversity faultilines, identifying new training needs, and decision-making practices that include diversity as a factor in human factor studies. Findings from these studies could be also beneficial for other high-risk organizations. .