Diversity Initiatives In Organizations Research Articles

Can selecting the most qualified candidate be unfair? Learning about socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages reduces the perceived fairness of meritocracy and increases support for socioeconomic diversity initiatives in organizations.

While the majority of Americans today endorse meritocracy as fair, we suggest that these perceptions can be shaped by whether or not people learn about the presence of socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages in others' lives. Across five studies (N = 3,318), we find that people are able to attach socioeconomic inequalities in applicants' backgrounds to their evaluation of the fairness of specific merit-based selection processes and outcomes. Learning that one applicant grew up advantaged-while the other grew up disadvantaged-leads both liberals and conservatives to believe that otherwise identical merit-based procedures and outcomes are significantly less fair. Importantly, learning about starting inequalities leads to greater support for policies that promote socioeconomic diversity in organizations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Supplemental Material for Can Selecting the Most Qualified Candidate Be Unfair? Learning About Socioeconomic Advantages and Disadvantages Reduces the Perceived Fairness of Meritocracy and Increases Support for Socioeconomic Diversity Initiatives in Organizations

Supplemental Material for Can Selecting the Most Qualified Candidate Be Unfair? Learning About Socioeconomic Advantages and Disadvantages Reduces the Perceived Fairness of Meritocracy and Increases Support for Socioeconomic Diversity Initiatives in Organizations

ESSENTIALIZED UTILITY: Organizational Adaptation to Diversity Initiatives

Contemporary U.S. organizations are increasingly adopting diversity initiatives. However, what diversity means and how these efforts are implemented remain contested. This article uses the case of women in policing to examine how organizational diversity initiatives can either alleviate or entrench existing inequalities. Drawing on 1 year of ethnographic fieldwork at four police training academies and 40 in-depth interviews with officers, I argue that during the onboarding process, police departments use women to bolster the existing masculine organizational ethos of policing. Police departments use a framework of essentialized utility, in which essentialized perspectives of minoritized groups—in this case, women—are used to reify organizational inequalities.

Lay theories of diversity initiatives: Theory and measurement of zero-sum and win-win beliefs

Three studies introduce a novel individual-difference construct to explain majority group members’ responses to organizational diversity efforts: lay theories of diversity initiatives. Zero-sum beliefs (ZSBs) presume that efforts to advance diversity come at the expense of majority group members. Win-win beliefs (WWBs) posit that diversity initiatives can benefit all racial groups. Study 1 created and validated measures of ZSBs and WWBs. Study 2 showed that ZSBs and WWBs are distinct from 10 intergroup measures (e.g., social dominance orientation, modern racism) and that each lay theory accounts for unique variance in explaining Whites’ reactions to diversity initiatives. Study 3 demonstrated that ZSBs and WWBs predict Whites’ reactions to diversity policies of a hypothetical company. These findings suggest that ZSBs and WWBs both help explain majority group members’ backlash against and support for organizational diversity initiatives.

Inequality in professional work

The persistence of income inequality despite inclusion efforts is a paradox that remains central to academic and policy inquiry alike. In this special issue, we bring together nine articles published in the Journal of Professions and Organizations (JPO) to highlight the ways in which professional stratification is moderated by intersectional identities and organizational diversity initiatives. Professions have long provided an excellent lens to investigate processes of social inequality and continue to be an important site to understand new formulations of identity and resource circulation globally (Harrington and Seabrooke 2020). We propose that the body of research around inequality in the professions answers three important questions; First, how do individuals experience and create strategies to manage their professional lives? Second, how do factors outside of the workplace influence professional experiences? And, third, how do organizations try to increase diversity and what are the outcomes of these initiatives? Altogether, we see these articles as building on the argument that social structure and inequality are not static concepts and hence, addressing their challenges requires dynamic and interconnected solutions. Social structure and inequality are processes influenced by multiple interactions between people, organizations, cultures, and environments. Using empirical illustrations and new theoretical frameworks, these selected articles reinforce the premise that professional expertise is often ‘done’ (West and Zimmerman 1987) and that such performances call for attention across different levels of analysis (Risman 2004).

Reducing Ambiguity Around Diversity in Organizations: A Review

In the United States, diversity is a popular yet ambiguous concept. To offer clarity, I review the literature on diversity in organizations that have shaped our conversations for the last 50 years. I first review the historically-informed approaches that shed light on the roots of the ambiguity around diversity management in organizations. I then review selected social psychological literature on diversity, particularly the works that inform diversity practices. Finally, I review the literature that explores the advantages of diversity in groups and the benefits of implemented diversity initiatives in organizations and the literature that examines the disadvantages of group diversity and when diversity initiatives fail in organizations. I integrate these three bodies of literature to offer a review of organizational diversity literature that will help readers and writers reduce ambiguity around the term diversity and better specify what they mean when referring to “diversity in organizations.”

Diversity initiatives in the US workplace: A brief history, their intended and unintended consequences

AbstractDiversity initiatives are designed to help workers from disadvantaged backgrounds achieve equitable opportunities and outcomes in organizations. However, these programs are often ineffective. To better understand less‐than‐desired outcomes and the shifting diversity landscape, we synthesize literature on how corporate affirmative action programs became diversity initiatives and current literature on their effectiveness. We focus specifically on work dealing with mechanisms that make diversity initiatives effective as well as their unintended consequences. When taken together, these literature point to several inequality‐specific omissions in contemporary discussions of organizational diversity initiatives, such as the omission of racial inequality. As we contend in the first section of this review, without affirmative action law, which initially tasked US employers with ending racial discrimination at the workplace, we would not have diversity initiatives. We conclude by providing directions for future research and elaborating on several core foci that scholars might pursue to better (re)connect issues of organizational diversity with the aims of equity, equality and social justice.

Diversity Initiatives and White Americans’ Perceptions of Racial Victimhood

Seven experiments explore whether organizational diversity initiatives heighten White Americans' concerns about the respect and value afforded toward their racial group and increase their perceptions of anti-White bias. The presence (vs. absence) of organizational diversity initiatives (i.e., diversity awards, diversity training, diversity mission statements) caused White Americans to perceive Whites as less respected and valued than Blacks and to blame a White man's rejection for a promotion on anti-White bias. Several moderators were tested, including evidence that Whites were clearly advantaged within the organization, that the rejected White candidate was less meritorious than the Black candidate, that promotion opportunities were abundant (vs. scarce), and individual differences related to support for the status hierarchy and identification with Whites. There was little evidence that these moderators reduced Whites' perceptions of diversity initiatives as harmful to their racial group.

Beyond gender: reconceptualizing understandings of work–life balance and the extreme work model for 21st-century high-potential top earners

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to broaden an understanding of women's perceptions regarding advancement potential/barriers to success in upper echelon corporate roles in the S&P 500 in connection with understanding 21st-century family dynamics, rather than addressing gender in isolation.Design/methodology/approachData collection in this study is based on semi-structured phone interviews with 13 women who have been identified by organizational leadership in an S&P 500 company as having high advancement potential. The results are evaluated using interpretive phenomenological analysis.FindingsParticipants' responses support existing research showing that women feel more responsible than their male counterparts for subordinating their career prospects to those of their male partners. Further, participants express that work–life and work–family balance constitute problematic barriers to advancement and often lead them to “choose” to slow-track career advancement and to avoid advancement opportunities. This choice narrative propagates women's perceptions that barriers to advancement are self-imposed. Participants viewed the extreme work model as inevitable in upper-echelon corporate roles, signaling the need for an increased understanding of how a broad definition of familial roles and work culture – rather than gendered issues in isolation – affect advancement opportunities in a 21st-century workforce.Practical implicationsCurrent organizational diversity initiatives have focused too myopically on gender. For organizations to create a more inclusive model for success at the upper echelons, it is essential to broaden organizational initiatives to address 21st-century employees rather than gendered programs. Organizations can endeavor to implement more effective models that enable two partners in a home with dependent children to advance, and all employees, even top leaders, to balance current definitions of work–life in several ways discussed.Originality/valueThe findings of this study are significant, in that they move toward addressing a gap in knowledge concerning women's perspectives on the changing family paradigm, extreme work culture and an expanded understanding of work–life balance. This reconceptualization can help mitigate gendered research and organizational programs that reinforce entrenched binaries, and instead enable organizations to implement more effective initiatives to improve advancement opportunities.

Os profissionais de relações públicas e comunicação: competências para a diversidade

In the past two decades, discussions on diversity have broadened. In the Brazilian context, especially in the private sector, the importance of this agenda is noticeable. For instance, the Brazilian newspaper “Folha de São Paulo” addressed the theme on the article “Diversity is the champion: What the World Cup and profitable companies can teach about inclusion” (FSP. July 23, 2018). In this article, Liliane Rocha, who is the founder and CEO of Kairós Management – Sustainability and Diversity Consultancy, explains that discussions about diversity within organizations started from the idea of sustainability, which became even broader when understood not only from an environmental basis, but also from a social impact perspective. In February 2019, the social networking website Facebook launched the Ads 4 Equality tool. By using algorithms, the advertising campaigns of agencies and advertisers are analyzed as to the representativeness of their characters in relation to the Brazilian population in terms of sex, race and body type (Coletiva.Net, 2019). The examples previously mentioned, in addition to the diversity initiatives in organizations, reveal that some reflections on the relationship with such diverse social groups are necessary. By doing so, it is believed that organizations can achieve their goals and contribute to the development of their social environment. Therefore, it is necessary to know to what extent the knowledge, skills and attitudes (Fleury & Fleury, 2001; Durand, 1998; Fawkes et al. 2018) of professionals in the communication market contribute to the practice of diversity in organizations (Fleury, 2000; Serrano, 2007; Thomas, 1999). With this in mind, we have developed an exploratory research based on a structured questionnaire with 33 questions. This tool was applied via Google forms to a non-probabilistic sample by accessibility (Weber & Persigo, 2017).). We obtained 191 participants and, based on the results, it was found that the majority reaffirm the importance of the theme, however only a few have actually worked on it. With regard to the effective development of diversity, knowledge on the issues of gender, race and accessibility, for example, was the least mentioned by these professionals as being necessary for communication activities, such as planning and mapping audiences, which are essential for any communicative structure. There is also evidence that the organizations involved in the research are not yet in the diversity management stage (Serrano, 2007). In theory, this situation would explain why certain competences, such as knowing how to learn and knowing how to engage to have a strategic vision (Fleury & Fleury, 2001), did not seem to be properly mobilized by the interviewed professionals. One of the most mentioned competences was precisely the mapping of audiences, whereas the others, related to individual diversity (race, religion, gender, and so on), were not recognized as those used by professionals on a daily basis. This perspective can help us somehow explain why diversity is still often practiced at the discursive (image gain) and utilitarian (profitability) levels. As a result, this study reveals a path to be followed by these professionals with a view to a more inclusive society.

Mixed Signals: The Unintended Effects of Diversity Initiatives

AbstractOrganizational diversity initiatives—programs and policies intended to increase the fairness of organizations and promote the inclusion, hiring, retention, and promotion of underrepresented groups—are ubiquitous. Despite the widespread implementation of diversity initiatives, several empirical investigations point to challenges associated with these initiatives. We suggest that one of the challenges hindering the effectiveness of diversity management involves the unintended signals that these initiatives send. Specifically, we review social psychological evidence that the mere presence of diversity initiatives can have unintended consequences through the communication of (1) fairness signals, (2) inclusion signals, and (3) competence signals. The presence of organizational diversity initiatives may lead to a presumption of fairness for underrepresented groups, making discrimination harder to identify and litigate. Conversely, these initiatives may lead to a presumption of unfairness for members of overrepresented groups, increasing the likelihood that traditionally advantaged groups will perceive themselves as victims of discrimination. The presence of diversity initiatives may increase the attractiveness of organizations to underrepresented groups who anticipate inclusion, but increase felt exclusion and threat among overrepresented groups. Finally, the presence of diversity initiatives may signal that underrepresented groups need help to succeed and are thus less competent than their advantaged counterparts. Researchers and practitioners should note the potential unintended signaling consequences of diversity initiatives, and build‐in accountability and social psychological knowledge when designing policies aimed at creating inclusive, diverse, and fair workplaces.

Counting heads vs making heads count

PurposeResearch on organizational diversity initiatives generally focus on either numerical diversity or racial climate. Both facets of diversity are critical, however, research has rarely examined their impact simultaneously. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachIn the current study, the authors use the context of higher education, to examine how variations in the composite of numerical diversity and racial climate predict psychological disparities between faculty of color (FOC) and White faculty. The authors test how institutions that engage in authentic diversity (i.e. institutions that are both numerically diverse and have a positive racial climate) compare to other diversity composites.FindingsUsing a data set of n=37,406 faculty members in US colleges/universities, this study found that racial disparities between FOC and White faculty for various psychological outcomes are smaller in authentic diversity institutions compared to institutions with low numeric diversity/ poor racial climate. Further, the data demonstrate that authentic diversity institutions have reduced psychological disparities compared to institutions with high numeric diversity/poor racial climate, but have similar disparities to institutions with low numeric/positive racial climate.Originality/valueThese results suggest that diversity climate may be the primary driver of mitigating psychological disparities between FOC and White faculty. However, it is necessary for institutions to authentically engage in diversity – by promoting both entities – to become more effective in reducing disparities.

Sandra L. Shullman, Ph.D., named as 2020 president of the American Psychological Association

The American Psychological Association (APA) has named Sandra L. Shullman, Ph.D., a consulting psychologist internationally known in leadership assessment and development, as 2020 president of the APA, officials announced Nov. 8. Shullman, who is a partner in the Columbus, Ohio, office of the Executive Development Group, manages large, long‐term global organizational client engagements, focusing on executive education and coaching, strategic leadership development and organizational diversity initiatives. She is a senior lecturer for the HEC School of Business in Paris, Shanghai, Beijing and Qatar, and part of the Duke University Global Learning Network faculty. Shullman has served two terms on the APA board of directors and seven years on the board of the American Psychological Foundation. She is past president of the Ohio Psychological Association.

Access to Counsel

Employment discrimination claimants in general, and racial minority claimants in particular, disproportionately lack access to legal counsel. When employment discrimination claimants lack counsel, they typically abandon their claims, or if they pursue their claims, they do so pro se (without counsel), a strategy that is seldom successful in court. Access to counsel is, hence, a decisive component in whether employment discrimination victims realize the potential of civil rights enforcement. Psychological science analyzes access to counsel by identifying psychological barriers—such as threatened social identity, mistrust in legal authorities, and fear of repercussions—that prevent employment discrimination victims from pursuing counsel. The analysis also identifies how cultural beliefs and practices concerning justice—such as meritocracy beliefs, perceived post-racialism, and organizational diversity initiatives—shape how judges, jurors, and lay people think about discrimination. Furthermore, counsels’ perceptions of other’s beliefs about discrimination shape their assessed likelihood of prevailing. These psychological barriers intersect with structural barriers to shape counsels’ evaluation of each case’s likely financial viability, which can prevent counsel from accepting cases that they otherwise deem meritorious. Policy can help those who experience employment discrimination obtain legal representation and meaningful redress for civil rights violations.

Diversity For Nonprofits: Mission Drift Or Mission Fulfillment?

Nonprofit stewardship imposes two special duties. As stewards of donative resources, nonprofits must fulfill their programmatic mandates. As stewards of public benefit, they must also be responsive to pressing social issues that transcend organizational confines. This paper examines the tension nonprofit leaders encounter when, in response to the latter duty, some stakeholders push for an organizational diversity initiative, while other stakeholders, in response to the former duty, claim organizational diversity initiatives trigger mission drift. Drawing upon an interdisciplinary theoretical palette, this article proposes a conceptual way to reconcile a tightly constructed nonprofit mission with a broader calling to mitigate the degenerative effects of historically embedded identity hierarchies.

Occupational work ethic differences: Implications for organizational diversity initiatives in health care organizations

This study was conducted to examine the extent of work value differences among ethnic classifications of baccalaureate nursing students. Major findings revealed significant differences between ethnic classifications and work ethic behaviors. Contrasts resulting from post-hoc tests indicated that Asian nursing students reported significantly lower scores of work ethic behavior when compared to African American, Caucasian, and Hispanic students. These differences remain unexplained due to low effect sizes.