Organizational commitment – how strongly a participant feels affiliated with an organization – is a fascinating phenomenon.  Strong organizational commitment can be highly beneficial to the organization and to the participant, because strongly committed participants generally contribute positively and helpfully to the organization. These contributions aren’t just in the form of improved productivity, but also in the form of organizational citizenship that improves the quality of interpersonal relationships within the organization, and the overall experience of being part of the organization.

(I use “participant” rather than “employee” because organizational commitment is important in paid employment and in volunteer work. It can be even more important in volunteer-based organizations, because strong affiliations, and the benefits that volunteers experience from them, can be a reason for volunteers to participate in the organization when there’s no financial reward for doing so.)

However, there’s a downside to organizational commitment. It can be so strong that participants tend to overlook or downplay, or even try to discredit, negative information or events. This isn’t necessarily because of any malicious intent, but because the participant genuinely believes that the information is inaccurate or that it reflects poorly on the organization. Addressing this conundrum is where researchers Daniel To, Elad Sherf, and Maryam Kouchaki have made an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on organizational diversity initiatives – by finding that managers having structural power in organizations may actually reduce their support for diversity initiatives.

When pretty much every organization has a statement or policy about the importance of diversity and the importance of supporting it, it may seem counter-intuitive that managers would resist diversity initiatives. This seems especially counter-intuitive when organizations’ diversity-related initiatives are usually formulated by managers or executives. But by using several existing data sets, all collected in the US federal public service, and also collecting original data from three online surveys of managers, the researchers discovered:

• The more structural power a manager had, and the more strongly that they identified with their organization, the less likely they were to perceive inequity in their organization. (Structural power was defined as the amount of authority that managers had over other positions or areas within the organization.)
• Managers were likely to rate their own organization as more equitable than other organizations.
• The more structural power a manager had, the less likely they were to support diversity initiatives.

Support for diversity initiatives was measured in the three online surveys by giving participants a financial budget – identified as surplus funds, so that funding one group would not deprive another group of its base allocation – and asking them to distribute the budgeted funds among six task forces. One of the task forces was around addressing diversity in the organization. The researchers assumed that the lower the funding that the participant allocated to that task force, the less the participant supported diversity initiatives. The participants were also asked to rank each task force from most to least important, as a more explicit expression of their support (or lack thereof) for diversity initiatives.

The researchers also conducted another online survey of managers and non-managers, and asked them to recall an incident of inequality in their own workplace that affected someone in their own work unit. The analysis of these data showed:

• Managers were more likely than non-managers to recall an incident of workplace inequality.
• Managers who recalled incidents of inequality in their own workplace were more likely to support diversity initiatives.

Based on these results, the researchers provide some practical recommendations for improving managers’ support of diversity initiatives.

First, invoking broader problems of societal inequality tends to be less effective at generating support for diversity efforts within an organization. This isn’t because employees or managers don’t think societal inequality is a problem, but because managers may tend to frame this information as what’s called a “not here” problem – as in, that may be a problem elsewhere, but it’s not a problem here.

Second, managers’ inaction or lack of support for diversity initiatives may not be because they don’t agree with the initiatives. It may be because they are genuinely not aware of the problems that these initiatives are trying to address. Alerting managers to these problems, particularly by encouraging them to reflect on their own experiences or what others in the organization may have experienced, may motivate managers to be more proactive. Providing managers with information in forms such as equity dashboards may demonstrate the type and extent of the organization’s equity-related issues, and thus emphasize to managers the importance of diversity-related initiatives.

Finally, the researchers propose that:

Practitioners may benefit from recharacterizing what is considered a “good” organization. An assumption underlying our theorizing is that managers are motivated to perceive less inequities precisely because “good” organizations are believed to be equitable. Ironically, those who are in the best position to affect positive change may be the least likely to do so, because they are interested in maintaining their beliefs that their organization is “good.” Rather than stating [that] “good” organizations do not contain inequity, our work implies another useful narrative may be to suggest that “good” organizations actively acknowledge and combat inequities in their workplace. (p. 144-145)

At a time when some management researchers are taking very regressive attitudes toward workplace equality and diversity issues, it’s heartening to see data-driven research that challenges assumptions about how and why managers react to diversity initiatives – and provides realistic, actionable solutions. Workplaces and organizations desperately need this sort of information.