Critical Perspectives on Diversity in Organizations

Thomas Calvard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351799188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Decades of investigations into diversity in the workplace have created mixed answers about what kinds of effects it has on employees and teams, and whether or not it can be managed effectively to generate positive outcomes for organizations. In contrast to mainstream work from management and psychology, critical views on workplace diversity have emerged that seek to grasp more fully the messy social and political realities of workplace diversity as they operate in context.

Critical Perspectives on Diversity in Organizations therefore seeks to review, integrate and build upon emerging critical perspectives on workplace diversity to help give a fuller understanding of how employee differences affect workplace interactions, relationships, employment, inequality, culture, and society. Critical perspectives help to fill in and openly recognize many of the more far-reaching issues that pure management and psychology approaches can leave out – issues of power, inequality, politics, history, culture, and lived experiences. If organizations do not try to take these issues into account and critically reflect on them, then diversity management is likely to remain a relatively blunt instrument or worse, a hollow piece of rhetoric.

This book will be of interest to international graduate students and researchers working on topics associated with equality, diversity and inclusion in organizations, as well as various organizational practitioners and activists engaged with these issues.

Part I

Diversity in Organizations

An Overview

1 Mainstream Approaches

Before outlining potential critical perspectives on diversity in organizations, this chapter will review what it sees as more ‘mainstream’ research and theory on organizational diversity and take it as a point of departure for the rest of the book. The chapter does not suggest a particularly damning attack on this work but will argue that its approaches paint a particular picture of diversity in organizational life, one with potential strengths, contributions, weaknesses, and concerning omissions. Mainstream diversity literature is defined broadly here in terms of dominant streams of articles published in top management, psychology and HR journals, often North American in tradition, often taking a quantitative, positivistic methodological approach in attempting to find generalizable, scientific-type findings about workplace diversity and its effects. This is not necessarily a perfect characterization of the literature, and over-generalizations would not be advisable, but it will serve for reviewing significant amounts of work that has taken, and continues to adopt, a particular style or genre in how it pursues and presents diversity research and findings.

When and Why Did We Start Researching Diversity in Organizations?

Ironically, given the tendency to emphasize data and objectivity, much mainstream research on organizational diversity doesn’t go very far in considering the history of the topic, its own or otherwise. This will appear more explicitly in other chapters, but here we note that when this type of diversity research does give an account of diversity’s history, it tends to be relatively restricted to a few landmarks or broad stages from within a North American perspective (e.g. Anand & Winters, 2008; Nkomo & Hoobler, 2014). While Nkomo and Hoobler (2014) provide much welcome historical and political insight into changing diversity ideologies, North America is still very much the focus.

Overall, two main landmarks stand out in this well-rehearsed, but limited, version of diversity’s history. First, there is the Civil Rights era leading up to the 1960s and in particular, the act of 1964, with labor laws aimed at ensuring Equal Opportunities, and outlawing discrimination, across characteristics like race, sex, nationality and religion. Second, there is the Workforce 2000 report, published in 1987 by the Hudson Institute, an American conservative non-profit think tank, focusing on the need for greater preparations to address the skills and demographics of a changing workforce (Johnston & Packer, 1987, cited in Nkomo & Hoobler, 2014). This second event paved the way for the more practical, corporate, human resource agenda on diversity and the turn from equal opportunities toward ‘diversity management’ into the 1990s (e.g. Thomas, 1990).

Quantitative research on management and organizational diversity grew alongside and out of these developments, particularly the latter period in the 1980s and 1990s when researchers began to take advantage of access to demographic organizational data. Early work in this stream went by the name ‘organizational demography’ (Pfeffer, 1985), as researchers investigated the demographic distributions of populations of workers and top management teams, and attempted to relate them to organizational behavior outcomes, such as turnover, innovation, and communication (e.g. Stewman, 1988; Wiersema & Bird, 1993). Instead of looking at distributions in aggregate, there also developed a slightly different, yet related, approach referred to as ‘relational demography’ (e.g. Tsui, Egan, & O’Reilly, 1992; Tsui & O’Reilly, 1989). Relational demography was more interested in how the demographic (dis)similarity of diverse team members, leaders and followers on single or multiple attributes relative to one another affected attitudes, behaviors and performance. Relational demography research has persisted, although debates about how to measure the feelings of relative dissimilarity of individuals-within-groups (e.g. more objectively or perceptually) – and the corresponding inferences that can be drawn from such measures – have continued (Riordan & Wayne, 2008). Mixed findings have persisted, with it remaining unclear how minority and majority individuals may feel about and interpret their relationships and status differences. The only real assertion made, typically via organizational psychology, is that future theory and testing needs to take better account of organizational cultures and individual differences in beliefs, motives and emotional responses (Chattopadhyay, George, & Ng, 2016).

This trajectory arguably reflects a particular instance of a more general, serious limitation of this type of management and organizational behavior research. There appears to be a tendency to lurch between analyzing quantitative demographic data that are relatively easy to collect in large amounts (and considered ‘objective’ to a significant extent) and generating universalistic diversity theory that tries to extract additional individual psychological variables but struggles to explain in full the many mixed messages of the demographic data. All the data analyzed do not confirm or refine any satisfying theory, and the occasional theory generated still fails to satisfy the data, leading to a cycle of limited, or stumbling, progress in understanding.

One paper did point out this ‘black box’ problem of the gulf between demographic patterns in organizations and the organizational behavior of teams and employees, about a decade after the body of work had started to accumulate (Lawrence, 1997). Lawrence (1997) noted the theoretical complexity of diversity’s effects in organizations and proposed four directions for trying to resolve this in future research – deeper multidimensional explanations, dynamic nonlinear models, identifying factors that lead to demographic distributions, and studying process alongside predictors and outcomes.

Whether or not subsequent research on diversity in organizations has addressed or pursued these four directions, and to what extent, is a very big and uncertain question. Certainly one danger is that quantitative research continues to generate an excessive identification of variables – personality traits, environmental perceptions, contextual conditions – that offer tiny fragments of explanation of what’s inside the black box of workplace diversity, fragments that don’t add up a coherent bigger picture. How to amass this evidence and make sense of it in a way that might genuinely guide organizational decisions and actions seems vexing and perplexing (Briner, Denyer, & Rousseau, 2009).

Diversity: ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’ for Teams and Organizations?

In the 1990s and early 2000s diversity management in developed economies continued to emerge, as organizations considered HR and management practices like diverse teams, diversity training, minority employee resource or affinity groups, mentoring, leadership development, and so on (e.g. Jayne & Dipboye, 2004).

Relatively early on, reviews of management research on diversity and teams acknowledged that diversity had simultaneous mixed effects and could act as a ‘double-edged sword’ on thoughts, emotions and behaviors affecting performance (Milliken & Martins, 1996). One persistent limitation seemed to be that such research was fairly intent on trying to establish whether diversity was positive or negative, or ‘good’ or ‘bad’, in its ‘main effects’ on various outcomes like performance and well-being, despite such questions inevitably being subject to many caveats (van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007). Papers worked at the problem by trying to establish ‘types’ or ‘dimensions’ of diversity, difference or attribute that might operate differently. One classic dichotomous example of this was to distinguish surface diversity (overt, demographic, and biological) from deep diversity (flexible, attitudinal, and informational) (Harrison, Price, & Bell, 1998). The implication was dressed up in theoretical language but really often boiled down to a sense that organizational actors needed to get past visible categories, demographics, and stereotypes if they were to appreciate the more functional, deeper, meaningful, and useful human attributes underneath.

In tandem with this typing of different differences, quantitative management research, almost always on diverse teams, would try to model moderator and mediator variables to shed further light on diversity’s ‘good’ and/or ‘bad’ influences. Moderator variables could be included to show when, where, and for whom diversity would operate differently, and mediators could be included to show how/why (e.g. Mohammed & Angell, 2004; Pelled, Eisenhardt & Xin, 1999). Arguably one problem here is that as studies and findings accumulate, a mixed picture and long list of team member variables emerges – such as conflict, time, interdependence, team personality traits, debate and decision norms, information sharing, leadership, beliefs, and more. Associations may feel unreliable, inconsistent or difficult to reconcile to the reader of such research. The implications tend to be of the unwieldy form that diversity types are variously good, bad or neutral in their effects at different times, for different teams, and under different conditions.

Overall, and in review, the ‘bad’ and ‘good’ perspectives of this body of team or workgroup diversity research became referred to in theoretical terms as the ‘social categorization’ perspective of disruptive ingroup/outgroup classifications, and the ‘information/decision-making’ perspective of creative, valuable expert discussions, respectively (van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007). In short, diversity was either driving a wedge through teams or leading to useful discussions -but with a tangle of processes in between and a potentially large range of different types of differences and perceptions of them among team members to start with.

In terms of theory, the main theories were mostly social psychological and located behind the negative predictions of the social categorization theory – similarity-attraction theory, social identity theory, self-categorization theory. Furthermore, researchers were potentially misusing the theories by deploying them in a simplistic way to hypothesize that diversity leads to ‘us-them’ feelings within a team and thus has negative effects as people feel more liking and attraction towards others they deem similar to themselves (van Knippenberg, de Dreu & Homan, 2004). In their categorization-elaboration model (CEM), van Knippenberg et al (2004) reemphasize this point and argue through their model that any attribute of team diversity can lead to positive or negative effects. Ultimately, they argued that the effects of diversity depend on the working context and if team members notice and process such differences in ways that positively help with completion of a task or negatively feed into intergroup biases. To some extent, this appeared to be simply rephrasing the overall problem and urging caution with this type of team diversity research.

Returning to the typing of diversity’s different differences (i.e. gender, age, expertise, tenure, personality etc.) – the typologies were inconsistent, proliferating, and not shown to be of consistent or clear explanatory value when findings were reviewed in several meta-analytic papers and reviews, which aggregated findings doing studies of compiled sets of studies. These category or classificatory labels for diversity were seemingly arbitrary, except they tried to make some rough distinctions between background characteristics, in terms of demography, skills, and attitudes/values. For example:

1. In a relatively early meta-analysis, Bowers, Pharmer, and Salas (2000) found a lack of significant effects of ability, personality and gender diversity or similarity on team performance.

2. In another meta-analysis, Webber and Donahue (2001) looked at whether ‘highly job-related’ or ‘less job-related’ diversity attributes had clear effects on team cohesion and performance. Results showed that neither type had any appreciable effects.

3. In a third meta-analysis of team demography and outcomes, Horwitz and Horwitz (2007) looked at the effects of ‘task-related’ and ‘bio-demographic’ diversity types on social integration and performance. They found a small positive effect of task-related diversity on performance but virtually no support for any other hypotheses or any effects.

4. Joshi and Roh (2009) meta-analyzed the effects of ‘relations-oriented’ and ‘task-oriented’ diversity on performance. They found very weak (but statistically significant) effects, negative and positive, for relations and task diversity, respectively. In addition, this was one of the first reviews to explore some significant effects of context – effects varied depending on the industry type, the broader occupational representation, team interdependence, and team type. Yet they note as ‘troubling’ how they “were also limited in our ability to code contextual variables, as the studies’ descriptions of research settings and team tasks were often scanty” (Joshi and Roh, 2009, p.621).

5. Finally, Bell et al. (2011) used Harrison and Klein’s (2007) conceptualizations of diversity as ‘variety’ (categories or ratios), ‘separation’ (incremental attitudinal differences), and disparity (power and status inequalities) to meta-analyze team diversity and performance. Again, they found some small positive and negative effects for differences in some expertise and demographics but many unrelated findings regardless of diversity conceptualization. They conclude that in team diversity research, “unclear results and mixed conclusions are pervasive… attributed to a consistent oversimplification of diversity… Making statements that suggest diversity is “good,” “bad,” or unrelated to team performance without specifying the variable of interest and the way in which diversity is conceptualized, is a flawed approach” (Bell et al., 2011, p.730).

It is quite alarming in some ways that such a thriving and ongoing program of research has described its own sense of progress over decades as equivocal, inconclusive, and inconsistent on several, recurrent occasions in top-tier international reviews of world-class management research (Joshi, Liao, & Roh, 2011). Furthermore, Bell et al. (2011), based on their work, seemed to be suggesting that efforts to aggregate diversity into categories of different difference should be scrapped, and researchers should return to where they started – trying to gather data on individual demographic variables and their own particular black boxes.

Variants on this kind of research emerge, as authors try to circle the problem afresh, but often with the same or only slightly modified theories, designs, and statistical tools. For example, Shemla, Meyer, Greer, and Jehn (2016) argue that going forward what matters is perceptions of group diversity, and gaining more clarity and consistency on how people see the (dis)similarities and splits in groups and their effects. In a way, this again reflects a return to the initial ‘black box’ problem, which presumably demographers had hoped they would be able to skirt around by collecting and analyzing supposedly ‘objective’ demographic workforce records and relating them to other perceptions and outcomes. There is also the challenging issue of considering diversity in terms of multiple levels of analysis, where the vast majority of this kind of research has focused on the team level (e.g. Nielsen, 2010). One exception to this is the work of Orlando Richard, who has linked diversity to strategies and industry environments at the firm or organization level of analysis (e.g. Richard, Murthi, & Ismail, 2007). However, arguably this work reproduces many of the issues of team-level research but at a higher level of analysis.

In sum, despite an impressive body of work and hypothesis testing in management research over the last few decades, findings on team and organizational diversity haven’t stood up well to reviews and the hopes of accumulating reliable and meaningful knowledge about its effects. At best, research seems to circle around addressing ideas of context and conceptualization, repeating that diversity can mean different things to different people in different settings, which future research should keep trying to capture. Moderators and mediators in quantitative analyses give some further insights, but only in a piecemeal way, as they offer up lots of ‘ifs and buts’ to diversity’s effects. We end up only being certain that diversity – of race and gender in teams, for example – can be sometimes good, sometimes bad, depending on a myriad of other factors around measurement, perceptions, context, task, team norms, strategy, time, and industry.

This research leads to a certain kind of progress and understanding but is ultimately only one kind. Other chapters of this book will argue that critical approaches to studying diversity offer various alternatives that can overcome some of the issues around appreciating the context and meaning of diversity in organizations. However, given that a pluralism of diversity research in management is likely to continue, much of it building on the studies mentioned previously but also taking other paths...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Diversity in Organizations: An Overview
• Part II: Defining Aspects of a Critical Perspective on Diversity in Organizations
• Part III: Elaborating on Critical Themes Concerning Diversity in Organizations
• Part IV: Implications of Critical Perspectives in a Future of Diverse Organizations
• Concluding Remarks
• References
• Index