Deconstructing Decoupling: How Power Shapes Diversity Management Implementation.

Abstract

I consider how diversity management strategies and practices are implemented within organizations, using this empirical setting to advance theory about processes of decoupling. While extant literature attributes a great deal of agency to top management in suggesting they strategically decouple for legitimacy gains, I find diversity managers themselves largely shape the particular type of implementation. While top leadership attention matters, diversity managers have a range of strategies to implement practices even when constrained by low power, as measured by lack of formal authority and low social capital. While high power managers are able to stave off decoupling and adopt diversity programs characterized by measurement and tracking, accountability, and formalization, low power managers also implement practices, although in somewhat different ways. Strategies used by low power managers include coalition building, appealing to external stakeholders, and “stealth coupling” where managers embed diversity efforts into existing HR practices, shielding them from scrutiny by moving diversity efforts behind the scenes. Additionally, my findings speak to the wide variation in practice implementation, which problematizes treating decoupling as a simple dichotomous variable. I also add to the decoupling literature by finding that decoupling does not operate in the often assumed trajectory, where initial decoupling is strategic and later gradually coupled as actors seek to remove internal contradictions within organizations. Rather, while this former type of decoupling does occur, in other cases, practices and structures are abandoned over time.