equality

Is Organizational Commitment the Reason that Managers Don’t Support Diversity?

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 (more…)

I See You: The Effects of Representation

Many organizations think that being inclusive is simply an issue of hiring members of underrepresented groups. But people hired on that basis are not going to stick around if they feel isolated or that they stand out, or that they’ve been hired just because they’re “diverse”. One very important element in inclusivity is representation; people want to see others like them, and also want to see those other people being respected and valued.

Part of a new study by a group of US researchers looks at the effects of representation in a place that isn’t often examined: the readings that students are assigned in university courses. There has been plenty of discussion over the past few decades about “the canon” in various academic fields and what determines whether a work is a “classic”  that all students should be familiar with. The researchers investigated whether the gender balance of assigned readings in a political-science course – the number of readings written by men and the number of readings written by women – affected female and male students’ self-efficacy: their confidence in their own ability to succeed. The study looked at (more…)

Racial Justice Education in Figure Skating — American Ice Theatre

Figure skating is a wonderful sport, but it is not as inclusive as it should be. Thanks to American Ice Theatre for providing this list of organizations that work to make figure skating accessible to all.

We hurt for our broken communities and the pain being felt all across the country. We stand together with the victims of murder, violence, and repression because of their skin color. As inclusion is one of American Ice Theatre’s core values, we believe it is imperative that we speak up and engage the figure skating community…

via Racial Justice Education in Figure Skating — American Ice Theatre

Oh, The Things I See… — Paula Stone Williams

Some of the most insightful observations about the comparative workplace experiences of men and women have come from people who have gone through a gender transition. Paula Stone Williams recently gave an excellent TED talk about what she learned as a man and as a woman, and she has now written a blog post on the same subject. Her perspective is very enlightening, particularly in showing how men and women can be treated differently in small or subtle ways – but all those little incidents add up to create big power imbalances that can be damaging to individuals and to organizations.

In a Q&A session after a keynote presentation earlier this month, I was asked about my personal discoveries related to gender inequity. Off the top of my head, I could not formulate a list. It did not take long to do so afterwards. In no particular order, here are 12 of my discoveries: In a […]

via Oh, The Things I See… — Paula Stone Williams

The Case(s) of the Misrepresented Women

Case studies are a common feature of the curriculum in most post-secondary business programs. They’re valuable teaching tools, but they’re  tricky to choose, because a case that’s too difficult or too easy, or too long or too short, can be a failure in the classroom. So I am probably not the only instructor who, when choosing a case, looks at things like how well the case fits with the subject for that class or course, whether the case can be done by an individual student or would work better with a team, or whether solving the case situation requires some serious thought and analysis. In other words, I usually don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the implicit assumptions underlying the case.

So that’s why I was both excited and also somewhat embarrassed to see the results of a new study that (more…)