organizations

Is Organizational Commitment the Reason Why 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 committeed 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 being part of them, can be a reason for volunteers to contribute to 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 can overlook, 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’ structural power managers 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…)

Being Woke about “Woke”

Research is intended to move knowledge forward. One of the ways that happens is by putting ideas forward and collectively discussing them.

A new article in the academic journal Academy of Management Perspectives asks the provocative question: Why Do Companies Go Woke? It’s extremely troubling that research mostly based on broad generalizations and selective interpretations has been published in such a high-profile journal – particularly one with the stated mission of “inform[ing] current and future ‘thought leaders’”.

Before anyone starts screaming “censorship” – the authors of the article, like any researchers, have a right to research whatever they think is worth researching, and to write about the results of that research. However, no researcher has the right to have their research published, and journals are not required to publish every submission they receive. The editors of Academy of Management Perspectives have affected the journal’s credibility by choosing to publish this article, thus legitimizing its inaccurate and divisive positions.

Analyzing how companies choose to react to events in society is an extremely valuable research topic. Understanding these reactions can generate further insights, and possibly assist other companies in reacting appropriately or productively. However, one of the many problems with the article’s approach to this topic is the article’s fundamental concepts: the definition of “woke”, and (more…)

Not Recommended

Organizations that are run by elected boards of directors, or boards of elected executives, often struggle with either getting members to run for election, or getting the right members to run for election. Depending on the type of organization, directors or executives are expected to be responsible for many different functions – and for some organizations, like co-operatives, the directors also have important legal and financial obligations.

One strategy to address this issue is for the board to recommend candidates for election. The nomination process is usually still open to any member who wants to run, but the board, or a subcommittee of the board, identifies the skills most needed on the board, and recommends the candidates it feels has those skills.  This sounds like a good way to ensure a functional and effective board, and it’s often suggested as a strategy by governance experts, but in reality it can be highly problematic.

When Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) was sold to a corporate owner in 2020, without the board consulting the membership, one of the criticisms of the sale focused around the board’s practice of recommending candidates for election. It was alleged that this practice resulted in the board being composed of “targeted professionals” that led the co-op away from its core mission and purpose and resulted in a more corporate mindset that limited the board’s approaches to the co-op’s financial challenges.

If you look at the publicly posted minutes and election results of organizations that use the practice of recommending board candidates, you’ll immediately notice two things:

  • Recommended candidates are almost guaranteed to be elected, and
  • Voter turnout for board elections is generally very low

For example, Vancity Credit Union, which has more than 500,000 members, has had turnout rates of between three percent and seven percent in its last five board elections. And in all of those elections, all of the recommended candidates have been elected, with the exception of one year when there were more recommended candidates than vacant positions.

From an organizational theory perspective, the process of the board recommending board candidates can lead to groupthink. The board identifies the skills it needs, but that identification is based on its own inherently biased perceptions of “fit”, which can result in the recommended candidates being similar to those already on the board. This in turn  can lead not only to a limited range of approaches to problems or issues, but also to implicit pressure on board members to conform to the dominant mindset, even if they disagree.

What can boards do to avoid these problems?  Here are three simple suggestions:

  • Don’t recommend candidates. If the board has identified skills or qualities that it feels it needs, that information can be presented to the voters, and candidates can be encouraged to present their own information to demonstrate that they have those skills or qualities. Voters, rather than the board, can decide whether a candidate is a good “fit” for the current composition of the board.

 

  • Don’t pre-screen candidates, beyond ensuring that they meet the basic qualifications needed for board membership. (For example, BC’s Societies Act, which governs not-for-profit organizations, specifies that directors must not be employees or contractors of the organization, must be at least 18 years old, and must not be an undischarged bankrupt.) Discouraging candidates who don’t “fit” may mean discouraging valuable counter-perspectives or different points of view.

 

  • If the board establishes a subcommittee to participate in the nominations process – for example, by identifying or encouraging potential candidates – the majority of the subcommittee’s members should not be board members. If the board has enough members on the committee to control its decision making, then the subcommittee is neither independent nor impartial.

On a larger scale, an organization that has a consistently low turnout rate for elections can also benefit from looking at whether that too is a problem. Research on union members’ participations in elections has suggested that quality may be more important than quantity; in other words, that it’s better for the organization to have a smaller turnout of informed voters than a larger turnout of less-prepared voters.

However, if an organization recommends board candidates, and those candidates almost always get elected, over time voters may feel that their vote has no impact, and be less inclined to make the effort to vote. And that may lead to larger issues of lack of member involvement and participation, which can have long-term negative effects on the organization – no matter what qualities or skills are represented on its board.

Sorry

Happy New Year!

It seems a little odd to start a new year of blogging (my 11th year) with an apology. I had planned to start posting again in mid-January and life got in the way, and I’m sorry for the unexplained delay. However, I’m beginning on a positive note by recommending an excellent book that I’ve just finished reading – and it just happens to be about apologies.

Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy have been running the site SorryWatch for more than a decade – I first discovered their work through the very entertaining SorryWatch Twitter account. Over the years, they have used SorryWatch to (more…)

Just Say No

In every workplace there are tasks that aren’t enjoyable to do, or that aren’t part of formal job descriptions but are important for building positive relationships and community. However, research has shown that these kinds of tasks – which some researchers have labeled “office housework” –  tend to be done more often by women and by members of demographic minorities. It’s also been suggested that doing these tasks can have a negative impact on the careers of those who regularly take them on.

The new book The No Club: Putting A Stop To Women’s Dead-End Work, by Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart,  is a very thoughtful analysis of this phenomenon. Coincidentally, I came across the book when I was thinking about how “office housework” functions in academic workplaces. I recently left an academic job, but I still regularly get requests to (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…)

Into the Gap

Happy 2021!

The Globe and Mail newspaper is currently running a series of articles titled Power Gap: a data-based investigation into gender inequality in Canadian workplaces. I’m really pleased to see attention and resources being directed towards understanding this issue. To date, the articles are doing a very good job of unpicking why there are more men than women in positions of power in Canadian workplaces, and why men are generally better-paid. But the series also shows how difficult it is to address these imbalances in a substantive way, because of data limitations. It’s hard to solve a problem without fully understanding what’s causing the problem.

The complete explanation of the Power Gap project methodology is paywalled, but to summarize it, the analysis relies on data from “sunshine lists” – lists of public sector employees with an annual salary above a certain level, which most Canadian provincial governments release every year. Because these lists are not consistently formatted across provinces – for example, not all provinces release employees’ full names – the data on the lists had to be combined and then adjusted so the data were comparable.

Also, since the purpose of the Power Gap project was to investigate gender inequality, the employees’ gender had to be added to the data set. Gender data were collected through several different methods, including (more…)

What Does “Systemic Racism” Mean?

“Systemic racism” is a term that’s been heard a lot in recent weeks, as communities, regions, and societies confront long-standing ugly realities around race and inequality. But what’s lacking in many of the reports about these upheavals is an explanation of what “systemic racism” means.

My expertise on this issue is primarily around how systemic racism functions in the workplace, not how it operaties in policing or in other contexts. However, since the commissioner of Canada’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has finally admitted that there is systemic racism within the RCMP itself, it’s worth remembering that what happens inside an organization or workplace can affect how the organization’s members interact with others. So understanding systemic racism within workplaces can also help to understand systemic racism elsewhere.

It’s also important to remember that organizations don’t make decisions or choices; people do. An organization doesn’t decide by itself to be racist or sexist or ableist. It’s decisions by people within the organization that cause those situations.

So when we talk about changing organizations to become less discriminatory and more inclusive – yes, we have to look at the policies and rules that guide how the organization operates, but we also have to look at the people within the organization, and the patterns of their decisions, and their attitudes. If people don’t change the way they act or think, then the organization won’t change.

To understand what “systemic racism” means, let’s start (more…)

A Crisis at Work

There’s more than enough chaos going on in the world right now. But amidst the coronavirus crisis, a couple of trends in the world of work are becoming more important.

We have been told for years that (more…)

Uber, Lyft, and Independent Contractors

Ridesharing officially came to British Columbia in January, when the provincial Passenger Transportation Board approved operating licenses for Lyft and Uber.  Vancouver is one of the last major cities in North America to get ridesharing, partly because of opposition from the local taxi industry and partly because of the lengthy process to amend the complex provincial legislation regulating rides for hire.

At the moment, ridesharing is limited to the Lower Mainland area (which includes Vancouver), and ridesharing drivers are more strictly regulated than they are in other regions. Uber and Lyft drivers in BC are required to have the same type of driver’s license as a taxi driver, and also have to pay a per-vehicle licensing fee in every municipality they do business in. Those costs will make it difficult for Uber and Lyft to get the types of drivers they do in other cities, who (in Uber’s words) are part-timers “fitting their driving around what matters most” and usually aren’t commercially-licensed drivers.

Several challenges to Uber and Lyft’s operations are already under way. BC taxi companies have filed a lawsuit against Uber and Lyft being granted permission to operate, arguing that the ridesharing firms have an unfair advantage because their licensing requirements are different from taxis. The mayor of Surrey has refused to allow Uber and Lyft to operate in that city. And riders with disabilities are upset that they may not be able to use Uber or Lyft because neither company requires its drivers to have accessible vehicles.

However, one of the most interesting challenges to Uber and Lyft’s arrival actually happened before either company was given permission to start operating. That challenge came from the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, which has already (more…)