Diversity in Organizations: Motivation & Analysis

• Diversity I, OAM 330, Spring 2025, Jake Jo

Motivation III

• Performance reviews are often demotivating due to biases, focusing on past behavior.
• Performance reviews are more useful when best practices are followed throughout the review process.
• Goal setting includes SMART Goals.
• Goal setting downsides include: tunnel vision, achievement ceiling, and unethical behavior.

Levels of Analysis

• Individual, group, and organization.
• The areas under individual analysis include: decision making, individual differences & personality, attitudes & behaviors, motivation, creativity, diversity and ethics.

Diversity

• Diversity refers to the compositional ways in which people are different from each other.
• Surface-level diversity includes traits that are highly visible such as race, gender, and age.
• Deep-level diversity includes dimensions that are harder to observe, such as values, beliefs, and attitudes.
• Humans often lean toward familiarity, which makes communicating with those who are similar easier.
• People will typically judge deep-level diversity based on surface-level diversity.

Similarity-Attraction Phenomenon

• Individuals are attracted to those who are similar to themselves.
• People show more positive attitudes, allocate greater resources, and are more strongly drawn to similar others.
• People in a minority group have fewer similar individuals they can turn to so they have fewer people to receive similar levels of support, assistance, or mentorship.

Challenges to Diversity

• This section includes hiring & promotions, mentorship and stereotypes.

Hiring

• Self-presentation matters in hiring.
• Researchers created resumes and sent them out for 1,600 entry-level positions.
• Resumes with references to demographic categories removed, resulted in the minority being more likely to receive callbacks.

Blind Hiring

• Blind hiring

Promotions

• Women constitute close to 50% of the workforce, yet men are 4x more likely to reach the highest levels of organization.
• As of September 2024, only 52 of the Fortune 500 companies (10.4%) are led by female CEOs.
• A pay gap still exists between men and women that are not explainable by differences in job performance.

Mentorship

• Employees often get promoted in organizations through having a powerful and influential mentor.
• Employees acquire tacit information and other intangible opportunities over time, with good mentors.
• People are more likely to informally adopt mentees who are similar to them.

Stereotypes

• Stereotypes are generalizations applied to a group.
• Many stereotypes are held outside of conscious awareness.
• Over-relying on stereotypes, instead of collecting actual data and verifying assumptions is an issue.
• As a result, stereotypes can lead to unfair decisions, perceptions, and attributions.

Problems with Stereotypes

• The mere existence of a stereotype can enhance or diminish job performance.
• Example: Asian women and math tests.
• People are more likely to make poor decisions or wrong attributions.
• Example: Men are more assertive and more confident
• Potential consequence: Managers are more likely to hire and promote male candidates for leadership positions.
• Potential consequence: Managers are more likely to attribute a team's success to a male employee.

Diversity Debate

• Diversity can have a positive or negative impact on overall organizational performance.
• This can be seen as a debate between a hero and a villain.

Case for Diversity

• Potential Benefits of Diversity: higher creativity in decision making, better understanding of customers, more adaptability, better breadth of KSA's and higher company performance.

Case Against Diversity

• Potential Challenges of Diversity: Social conflict, poor communication, loss of trust, power and status differences and feelings of injustice.

What Diversity Really Means

• Diversity is about the distribution of differences on a particular dimension.
• The importance of being specific about the dimension.
• This includes variety, separation and disparity.

Variety

• Variety is the composition of information access.
• Variety represents differences based on an individuals unique knowledge, skills, and abilities.
• Includes demographics like: gender, race, and age.
• Variety also includes: functional background and social networks.
• Variety is frequently linked with: higher decision making quality, increased creativity and improved flexibility.

Variety Illustrations

• Minimum
• Moderate
• Maximum

Separation

• Separation is the composition of feeling.
• it represents differences based on where one stands on an issue
• Based on values attitudes, beliefs.
• Separation is frequently linked with: less cohesion, lower trust and social disintegration.

Separation Illustrations

• Minimum
• Moderate
• Maximum

Disparity

• Disparity is the composition of dominance.
• Disparity represents differences in something we own.
• Includes rewards, pay, and status.
• Disparity if frequently linked with: higher competition, lower levels of motivation, and counterproductive behaviors.

Disparity Illustrations

• Minimum
• Moderate
• Maximum

Building Variety

• Draw from different social circles.
• Randomly assign groups.
• Assign someone who does not have relevant task knowledge.
• Create effective norms.
• Emphasize team identity.
• Use low-stakes, acquaintance activity.
• Make it common practice to always poll everyone.

Companies

• IDEO

Avoiding Separation

• Build social bridges.
• Identify someone who can bridge subgroups.
• Encourage perspective-taking and emphasize advantages of others' positions

Reducing Disparity

• Increase input opportunities for all members.
• Make it a common practice to rotate leadership roles and responsibilities.
• Encourage anonymous input and feedback.

Faultlines

• A faultline is an attribute along which a group is split into subgroups.
• Most commonly due to demographics.
• Members of different subgroups may avoid communicating with each other.
• Faultlines are most likely to emerge when all demographic attributes are distinct.
• Teams with faultlines tend to experience more conflict, are less cohesive, and perform worse.

Overcoming Faultlines

• Avoid obvious and highly visible divisions on social categories.
• Emphasize shared purpose and identity.
• Create team-based rewards.

Managing Diversity

• Variety generates task conflict is good.
• Disagreements that arise from differences in variety often lead to necessary discussions on how to move forward
• Separation/Disparity generates relationship conflict is bad.
• Presence of separation and disparity can stifle variety.
• It is important for good leaders to actively identify and address potential for separation and disparity.

Key Takeaways (Diversity I)

• Challenges arise due to similarity attraction phenomenon.
• Minority group members face challenges in hiring, promotions, mentorship, and stereotypes.
• As organizations become more diverse, it becomes more important to have leaders who can connect and build variety while limiting separation and disparity.

Next Class

• Diversity II