Understanding Diversity in the Workplace

Diversity

• Diversity is identity-based differences among people affecting their experiences as applicants, employees, and customers.
• Identity groups are formed based on differences such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and age.

Managing Diversity and Inclusion

• Managing diversity ensures diverse groups are valued and treated fairly.
• Inclusion refers to the degree employees are accepted and treated fairly.

Types of Diversity

• Surface-level diversity includes visible characteristics like age, body size, disabilities, race, and sex.
• Deep-level diversity involves non-observable characteristics like attitudes, values, and beliefs.
• Hidden diversity is concealed deep-level characteristics, such as sexual orientation or political views, revealed at discretion.

Bias Against Diversity

• Some people use the Martin Buber mindset of judging based on one surface trait.
• I-It: judging a person based on limited surface-level characteristics.
• I-Thou: recognizing a person's multiple traits and characteristics.

Canadian Legal Framework on Diversity

• 1971 Canadian Multiculturalism Policy: Aimed for nondiscrimination, but deemed insufficient due to persistent inequalities.
• 1982 Charter of Rights: Goals were nondiscrimination and correcting inequalities from past discrimination.
• 1995 Canada Employment Equity Act: Encourages barrier-free working conditions to prevent discrimination.
• 1996 BC Human Rights Code: Protects against discrimination in areas like housing and jobs.

Theories and Terminology

• Social Identity Theory: People categorize others as in-group (similar) or out-group (different, with stereotypes).
• Justification Suppression Model: People suppress prejudice expression due to social disapproval, empathy, or personal beliefs.
• Glass Ceiling: An invisible barrier to promotion for women in male-dominant fields.

Sexual Harassment

• Quid Pro Quo: Exchange of rewards for sexual favors.
• Hostile Environment: Unwelcome sexual advances and verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature.

Racism

• Systemic Racism: Policies and practices causing negative outcomes for racial minorities.
• Personal Racism: Negative attitudes, beliefs, or actions toward a racial group
• Explicit Bias: Conscious feelings/actions toward a group member due to their group membership.
• Implicit Bias: Quick, unconscious feelings/actions toward a group member.
• Phenotype Bias: Favoring/disfavoring based on appearance matching a particular group, treating ethnicity as a dimension.

Systems of Determining Reward

• Equality: Everyone gets the same.
• Meritocracy: Everyone gets what they earn.
• Egalitarianism: Those in the greatest need get the most help.

Why Diversity?

• Challenges: Lower organizational attachment and slower collaboration due to differing values.
• Benefits: Hiring advantage, access and legitimacy perspective, reputation, marketing, cognitive diversity, and justice.

How to Build Diversity

• Set aside individualism and focus on group identity/justice.
• Possible consequences: Enhanced majority ethnic identity, reinterpretation of discrimination evidence.

Managerial Decision Making

• Decision making involves thinking through options and selecting one.
• Stakeholders are impacted by a decision.
• Triple Bottom Line: Decisions must consider financial, environmental, and social consequences.

How Brain Systems Make Decisions

• Reflective: Logical, analytical, and methodical decisions.
• Reactive: Quick and intuitive decisions.
• Emotional Intelligence: Ability to understand and manage emotions.
• Faith in Intuition: Believing ideas that feel true are true, which can lead to errors despite increased confidence.

Programmed and Non-programmed Decisions

• Programmed: Repetitive decisions guided by rules and heuristics (mental shortcuts).
• Non-Programmed: Unstructured decisions with ambiguous or incomplete information

Rational Decision Making Process

• Recognize the need to decide.
• Generate alternatives.
• Analyze alternatives.
• Select the best option.
• Implement selection.
• Evaluate the outcome.

Decision Making Styles

• Maximizer: Seeks the best possible solution.
• Satisficer: Takes the first acceptable option.
• Flexificer: Ability to do both.

Barriers to Effective Decision Making

• Bounded Rationality: Complex decisions cannot be fully rational due to limited exploration of alternatives.
• Escalation of Commitment: Remaining committed to poor decisions, increasing negative outcomes.
• Uncertainty: Decisions made despite uncertainty often unacknowledged.
• Conflict Avoidance: Avoiding conflict when making decisions
• Relational: Personal conflict that involves attacks.
• Process: Related to the way to do something

Ethics: Prescriptions, Actuality, Consideration

• Philosophical Theories on Ethical Decisions (Systems 1-7):
  • Divine Command Theory: Ethics based on God's commands, requires universal agreement on God's existence.
  • Utilitarianism: Ethics based on maximizing good for the greatest number.
  • Individual Rights: Ethics based on entitlements.
  • Virtue Theory: Emphasis on virtue and motivation over the effect of a single act.
  • Kant's Categorical Imperative: Actions are right if one wants everyone to act the same way.
  • Role-Based Ethics: Ethics based on relationships and duties.
  • Cultural Agreement Theory: Follow widely shared ethical values across cultures.
• Theories on How People Actually Decide Ethics (Systems 8-12):
  • Intuition: Moral conclusions justified by feelings, may lead to prejudice and selfishness.
  • Girard's Theory of Mimetics: Ethical talk is a story to feel better. Guilt is relieved through scapegoating
  • Moral Foundations Theory: Morality is not reasoned through, but used to justify pre-existing intuitions.

Motivation

• Motivation: A force that energizes, directs, and sustains human behavior.
• Locations include within and outside the body.

Content Theories

• Manifest Needs Theory (Henry Murray):
  • Primary Needs: Inborn (food and water).
  • Secondary Needs: Learned (achievement, love, affiliation).
• Visibility of Needs:
  • Manifest: Obvious from current behavior.
  • Latent: Not yet visible, but ready to motivate a person.
• Learned Needs Theory (David McLelland):
  • nAch (Achievement): Need to excel at difficult tasks.
  • nAff (Affiliation): Need for warm relationships.
  • nPow (Power): Need to influence others.

Alderfer's ERG Theory

• Growth Needs: Internal self-esteem and self-actualization.
• Relatedness Needs: Social, esteem, and interpersonal safety needs.
• Existence Needs: Physiological and material safety needs.
• Application: Do not project personal needs, diagnose/observe needs, and design the workplace to meet needs.

Herzberg's Motivator-Hygiene Theory

• Interviews with satisfied and unsatisfied workers were conducted.
• Hygiene: Pay, working conditions, supervision, security.
• Motivators: Esteem, self-actualization.
• Importance: Fixing hygiene does not guarantee satisfaction or motivation.

Process Theories

• Operant Conditioning: Behavioral consequences influence behavior.
• Goal Setting Theory: Management through objectives.
• Equity Theory: Outcome matters less than comparison to others; workers overestimate others’ input.
• Expectancy Theory:
  • Effort (1) - Performance (2) - Outcome (3) - Values Fulfilled.

Barriers to Motivation

• Workers engage in psychological safety behaviors (PSBs) to avoid discomfort, increasing anxiety long-term.
  • Stop interpreting psychological discomfort as an enemy. Commit to values/goals and endure discomfort.
• Inappropriate Feedback: Should be a subjective reaction, not objective.

Reinforcement Application

• Pay Related:
  • Piecework: Immediate reinforcement, complex supervision.
  • ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan): Aligns employee goals, weak tie to stock gains.
  • Profit Sharing: Aligns goals, risk carried by those at the top
  • Gainsharing: Divides financial gains from productivity, gains hard to calculate fairly.

What is Leadership

• Leadership: A social influence relationship to reach mutual goals; effective leaders achieve set goals.
• Management: Appointed managers plan, organize, direct, and control.
• Theory X: Dislikes work, incapable of self-direction.
• Theory Y: Likes work, capable of self-direction.

Trait Approach to Leadership

• Traits for effective leaders: drive, motivation, honesty, self-confidence, cognitive ability, knowledge.

Behavioral Approaches to Leadership

• How leaders act, not personality, matters.
• Ohio State Studies: Consideration (caring) and initiating structure (goal setting).
• U of Michigan Studies: Job-centered (planning, scheduling) and employee-centered

Situational Approach to Leadership

• Fiedler's Contingency Model:
  • Task-Oriented Leader: Negative view of difficult coworkers
  • Relationship-Oriented: Differing view of difficult coworkers
• Contingency: If people aren't a good fit they should be removed.
• Robert House Path Goal Theory:
  • Leaders clarify path, remove blocks.
  • Determine desired outcomes.
  • Make satisfaction contingent on goals.
  • Remove blocks, express confidence.

Transformational or Charismatic Leaders

• Motivate workers beyond self-interest.
• Vision, communication, risk-taking, and confidence.

Culture and Leadership

• Collectivist Culture: Focus on relationships and group needs
• Individual Culture: Focus on individuals
• "Must": Indicates cultural values that need to be followed.
• Theory of Hui and Luk: Leadership has cultural dimensions and varies across cultures.

Power

• Interpersonal relationship where one can cause another to act differently.
• Authority: The right to seek compliance, also called legitimate power.
• Leadership: Used to elicit responses that go beyond required or mechanical compliance

Limits on Power

• Subordinate values: If subordinates don't value resource controlled by superior, power is nullified.
• Nature of Relationship: Valued personal relationship can limit or worsen power use.
• Counter-Power: Unions

Who Gets Power? Who Doesn't?

• Power Dependency Principle: Power is based on how much others depend on you.

Uses of Power to Get More Power

• Controlling access to information/persons.
• Selecting objective criteria.
• Controlling agendas (meetings).
• Using outside experts.
• Bureaucratic gamesmanship.

Politics

• Activities to acquire, develop, and use power.
• Intergroup: Power/control of critical resources and strategic activities
• Lawrance and Lorsch Study:
  • Successful firms place power in strategic divisions.
  • Unsuccessful firms don’t.
• Reduce Political Behavior:
  • Reduce uncertainty. Clarify evaluation. Reduce competition. Break/prevent fiefdoms, segregate problematic people.