A Framework for Organizational Diversity Management

Introduction

This article focuses on diversity management, which is an organizational process designed to promote diversity in the workplace. The authors introduce a framework that both outlines various approaches to diversity management and illustrates the relationship between those approaches and diversity outcomes in an organization.

Jesse E. Olsen is a Senior Lecturer of Management in the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne and a Research Associate at the Centre for Asian Business and Economics. His research focuses on hobbies and work, improvisation in organizations, diversity and inclusion, international/cross-cultural management, and leadership. Luis L. Martins is a Professor and the Director of the Herb Kelleher Entrepreneurship Center at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business. His research focuses on the cognitive underpinnings of strategy, entrepreneurship, innovation, organizational change, team dynamics, and work performance.

Methods and Findings

The authors analyzed existing research on diversity management to develop their framework regarding diversity management approaches. The first theme that emerged from this research is the importance of values in an organization’s approach to diversity management. There are three variations of values described by Olsen and Martins: instrumental, terminal, and both. Whether an organization holds instrumental values or terminal values (or both) will determine diversity outcomes for the organization. 

Values around Diversity Management and their Outcomes

• Instrumental Values: Guide behaviors related to diversity in order to achieve positive organizational outcomes (such as competitiveness, for a business).
  • Outcome: These values are shown to have a positive impact on culture and environment in the workplace for majority and minority group members because values of diversity are perceived as fair and reasonable. 
  • Outcome: They also help identify and manage potential negative effects of diversity, such as intergroup conflict, and leverage diversity for organizational objectives, leading to better performance outcomes.
• Terminal Values: Referring to valuing diversity for its own sake, without considerations for organizational outcomes.
  • Outcome: These values attract individuals who see diversity as inherently valuable but might be less effective in appealing to staff broadly.
• Dual Approach: Adopting both instrumental and terminal values.
  • Outcome: These values attract a wider range of individuals, enhancing overall workforce diversity. This dual approach is expected to result in more positive perceptions and greater attraction and retention of diverse staff.

Olsen and Martins also identify themes in diversity management approaches regarding  interactions among diverse groups within an organization, which are often referred to as ‘acculturation strategies.’ “Acculturation refers to the process through which cultural changes occur as a result of continuous contact between cultural groups.” These four acculturation strategies, like the value types described above, have related implications for diversity outcomes. 

Strategies for Acculturation and their Outcomes

1. Separation: Groups maintain their own cultures and minimize interaction.
   • Outcome: This strategy does not support a diverse workplace.
2. Marginalization: Groups maintain neither their own culture nor the dominant culture.
   • Outcome: This strategy does not support a diverse workplace.
3. Assimilation: Non-dominant groups conform to the dominant culture.
   • Outcome: This strategy may allow for diversity in recruitment to an organization, but ultimately staff of all backgrounds are influenced to abide by dominant norms, which is not supportive of diversity in the workplace.
4. Integration: Mutual cultural change, through which all groups retain significant aspects of their own cultures.
   • Outcome: This strategy has the greatest impact on diversity outcomes. Organizations with integration strategies have more diverse staff, facilitate creativity and collaboration in the workplace, and foster an inclusive environment.

The paper introduces a new framework for thinking about diversity management approaches by combining the three value types (terminal, instrumental, and dual) with the two acculturation strategies (assimilation and integration). The authors dismiss the separation and marginalization acculturation strategies since they do not seek to support diversity outcomes. This creates six distinct diversity management approaches.

Six Diversity Management Approaches

1. Terminal Assimilation: Prioritizes equal opportunities for minority groups but promotes assimilation into the dominant culture, which leads to potential barriers for minority advancement and limited organizational performance benefits from diversity.
2. Terminal Integration: Prioritizes diversity for its own sake, emphasizing equal consideration for all cultural groups without requiring assimilation into the dominant culture. Thus, this approach promotes equality and reduces barriers for minorities but does not fully leverage diversity for organizational performance benefits.
3. Instrumental Assimilation: Recognizes diversity for its ability to allow the organization to connect with diverse audiences but expects employees to conform to the dominant culture, thereby limiting the advancement of minorities and dampening the potential for creativity and enhanced decision-making.
4. Instrumental Integration: Values diversity for achieving organizational goals by encouraging members to draw on their cultural identities, enhancing creativity, decision making, problem solving, and flexibility, while fostering an inclusive climate and constructive exchange of ideas.
5. Dual-Value Assimilation: Views diversity as both an end state and a means to achieve business objectives, emphasizing equal opportunities and conformity to the dominant culture while leveraging diversity for marketing and customer service, balancing moral and business cases for diversity.
6. Dual-Value Integration: Values diversity both as a means to achieve organizational goals and as an end in itself, encouraging the expression of cultural identities among members and balancing business objectives with moral, legal, and social responsibilities.

Conclusions

The authors do not provide recommendations on which approach(es) an organization should pursue to advance diversity. Rather, they explain that their framework can be used as a tool to understand and analyze different organizational approaches in diversity management, which balance the inherent value of diversity and its utility for organizational performance. The authors argue that different approaches may be best suited to different organizational contexts, and this warrants further research. They encourage researchers to test and leverage this framework to improve organizations’ diversity management approaches.

A Key to Full-Scale Organizational Transformation: Implementation Teams

Introduction

Higgins, Weiner, and Young define a specific organizational body they refer to as an “implementation team.” This team is charged with designing and leading an organization-wide change strategy. Implementation teams are critical for all organizations aiming to achieve full-scale strategic changes. They are most beneficial in organizational contexts where change is frequently stymied, decisions are highly bureaucratized, and agents are resistant to move. Using the U.S. public school system as their model, Higgins et al. examine the composition of these teams and contend that they can champion organizational change in the right context. 

This study focuses on a particular subset of the public school system where systematic changes are carried out most directly by the school district, noting the “leader” is the school district CEO or superintendent. In these scenarios, the authors note that the “organization” is the school district (defined by geographic proximity), and the “implementation teams” are the individuals  charged by leadership with designing and deploying an instructional improvement strategy. The authors define two metrics they will observe in the study: positional diversity and tenure diversity. Positional diversity is indicated by the variety of current individual positions that constitute the implementation team. Tenure diversity is indicated by the variety of tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure positions on the implementation team, and the authors suggest that tenure differences might be salient because school systems tend to be quite hierarchical. Individuals with different tenures may bring varying insights about a) the barriers to implementation and b) identifying other stakeholders who may help implement the strategy. 

Setting forth these two metrics, the authors hypothesize that there will exist no relationship between individual team member learning and Hackman’s definition of a “real team.” This is because of the unique composition and task assignment of an implementation team: to facilitate organizational change. They expect that the collective enterprise and interdependence of implementation team members will hold regardless of the circumscribed boundaries suggested by “real teams.” Four discrete hypotheses are identified subsequently: 

• H1: The better the implementation team’s direction, structure, support, and expert coaching, the greater will be team member learning.
• H2: The greater the positional diversity of the implementation team, the greater the team member learning. 
• H3: The greater the tenure diversity of the implementation team, the greater the team member learning. 
• H4: The effect of the team’s enabling conditions on team member learning will vary by the team’s positional diversity such that when enabling conditions are low, positional diversity will enhance team member learning. (370-373)

Monica Higgins is a Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education whose research focuses on teams, leadership development, and organizational change. She co-authored the piece with two doctoral candidates at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Jennie Weiner and Lisa Young, whose research focuses on school leadership and intellectual history, respectively. 

Methods and Findings

In this study, superintendents across multiple Connecticut school districts were  asked to identify individuals whom they regarded as their “senior administrative team for the purposes of developing and implementing their instructional improvement strategy” (373). Each selected member then assessed their perceptions of the teams’ structural features (composition and  task design), process indicators, and effectiveness. 226 responses were recorded at a 95% response rate in 2008, and 262 responses were recorded at an 89% response rate again in 2009. 

The authors outline two aspects of: “the implementation team” model. The first analysis evaluated if “stability” is better linked to roles than to individuals. They observed role turnover across various administrations to determine if the role was eliminated, replaced, or occupied by a different individual between the two periods of data collection. Their analysis showed that 32 people (16%) left their team between the first and second evaluations. 

The second factor evaluated was if individuals on teams with low or high levels of positional diversity did (or did not) employ their roles. Data was collected during recorded team meetings. Team A (high positional diversity) used nearly double the number of positioning statements (e.g., “as an administrator, I am feeling …”) than did Team B (low positional diversity). The percentage of positioning statements (relative to total statements) utilized by Team A was much higher (41%) than Team B ( 13%).  Additionally, positioning statements from Team A members tended to focus on the potential impact of their work from the viewpoint of its external stakeholders, whereas positioning statements from Team B members tended to focus internally on the nature of the team’s work. 

Finding 1: Team stability may be an important dimension of an implementation team, but role membership may contribute to this stability more than individual membership. 

Finding 2: Based on the extent to which positions held by team members represent different roles within the organization, the diversity of roles held by implementation team members was particularly important in successful teams. 

Finding 3: Positional diversity in implementation teams may not help in certain situations, like a case in which enabling conditions are favorable.  

In the first year, each hypothesis test yielded the following: 

H1: Mostly supported. Most socio-structural conditions (compelling direction, enabling structure, and supportive context) are positively correlated with team member learning; yet none of the “real team” measures had a statistically significant relationship with team member learning.  

H2 and H3: Not supported. The analysis did not support either of the following predictions: greater positional and greater tenure diversity would yield greater team member learning

H4: Supported. Two interactions exist: one between positional diversity and compelling direction and the other between positional diversity and supportive context. When individuals rate their teams poorly on enabling conditions (compelling direction and supportive context, in this case), greater positional diversity mitigates negative effects on team member learning. Conversely, on teams that already feel supported (individuals rate their teams highly on enabling conditions), positional diversity is unhelpful. This surprise may suggest that enabling conditions like compelling direction may not be important in team compositions.  

In the second year of data collection, the authors found that the same three enabling conditions (supportive context, enabling structure, and compelling direction) demonstrated a positive relationship with team member learning (H1). However, no relationship was found between the “real team” indicators and learning. Second, neither positional nor tenure diversity had a significant relationship with team member learning (H2 and H3). Third, there were two significant and negative interactions between positional diversity and enabling conditions (H4): when individuals felt less supported on their teams, greater positional diversity mitigated the negative effects on team member learning; conversely, when individuals felt more supported on their teams, positional diversity was unhelpful in mitigating negative effects on team member learning, which again suggests that enabling conditions may not be important in team compositions. 

Conclusions

System-wide changes have a greater potential to be effectively achieved when teams are specifically designed to accommodate a great degree of flexibility and adaptability within them. In organizational contexts today, where the urgency for change is acute, collaborative forms of leadership like those achieved on implementation teams are evermore necessary.  Future research to engage in multi-level analyses is needed to consider how team-level factors like diversity influence individual outcomes (e.g., team member learning). 

Expand Antiracism Initiatives Beyond Diversity Training

Introduction

Using theory and research, Kalinoski and his colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 65 studies to assess the impact of diversity, attitudes, and training on affective, cognitive, and skill-based outcomes. This research aims to serve as a tool for researchers and practitioners to begin managing diversity within their organizations and develop effective diversity training. Human Resources and training managers can use lessons learned from this research to defend and improve diversity training within their respective institutions. Generally, diversity training had a small to medium-sized effect. Cognitive-based or skills-based diversity training was found to have a stronger effect in comparison to affective-based interventions. Training targeting explicit attitude change had a larger impact on implicit attitude change. Active training (e.g., exercises) compared to passive training (e.g., lectures, videos) had  a stronger influence, the researchers found, as with face-to-face training compared to computer-based training. 

The authors of this paper are interested in training and development, diversity and cross-cultural collaboration, motivating individuals and teams, as well as organizational development among other topics. Zachary T. Kalinoski is an associate scientist at Aptima, Inc. He earned his PhD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Wright State University. Debra Steele-Johnson is an associate professor of Psychology in the Industrial and Organizational Psychology PhD concentration at Wright State University. She received her PhD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from the University of Minnesota. Elizabeth J. Peyton, Keith A. Leas, and Julie Steinke completed their MS and PhD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology at Wright State University. Nathan A. Bowling is a professor of Psychology in the Industrial and Organizational Psychology PhD concentration at Wright State University.

Methods and Findings

The researchers searched for articles using keyword searches such as diversity training, cultural diversity training, racial awareness training, and multicultural education post-1964. Analysis of articles was limited to those with numerical data but all study designs (e.g., training vs. control groups with pre-tests and post-tests) were presented in the meta-analysis. A total of 200 articles were found but 74 were disregarded due to no numerical data and 61 articles were disregarded due to inadequate data. Two of the authors of this study served as coders and were trained on coding strategies, definitions, criteria, and decision rules. The two coders discussed any discrepancies. Studies were either categorized to have affective-based outcomes, cognitive-based outcomes, and skills-based outcomes. Affective-based outcomes refer to attitudes and motivation, while skill-based outcomes include changes in behavior and cognitive-based outcomes include verbal knowledge as well as cognitive strategies. Further, moderators and trainees were assessed on metrics such as task interdependence, training duration and medium, types of participant, and training setting.

The authors found that factors such as the presence of a needs assessment, training choice, diversity of the group being trained, and rigor of the training design had a limited impact on the effectiveness of diversity training, where the authors define effectiveness as a change in attitudes and processes.

Conclusions

The authors found that diversity training has between small and medium effects on diversity learning. Diversity training revealed a medium to large impact on cognitive-based and skill-based outcomes, whereas it revealed only a small- to medium-sized effect on affective-based outcomes. Training that allowed for more social interaction was found to be more favorable for affective-based outcomes. Kalinoski et al.  examined existing theory and research on diversity, attitudes, and training to identify potential differential effects of diversity training on affective-based, cognitive-based, and skill-based outcomes. This study provides critical information to Human Resource and training managers, practitioners, and researchers to understand the impact of diversity training on different learning outcomes and across different circumstances and can be used to develop and design effective diversity training. The authors identified the homogeneous set of studies used in this analysis as a limitation of the study. Further, organizational generalizability may pose a challenge and the sample size may also be seen as a constraint. Additional research on integrating attitude and training theory or models into design of diversity training can provide more information. Also institutions should not limit their antiracism work to diversity training, but should view it as a component of a larger set of diversity initiatives.