Psychology of Inclusion
Do Diversity Strategies Hurt or Help Racial Inequality?
An investigation of how different types of organizational diversity training yield divergent outcomes, and more specifically how the messaging used influences attitudes and behavior.
Contemporary forms of bias and discrimination continue to contribute to employment disparities in hiring, compensation, promotion, and other employment outcomes. This project focuses on the dual role of institutions in both perpetuating racial bias and offering interventions that attempt to reduce racial inequality.
Organizations are currently the home of most change strategies that focus on eliminating bias, promoting diversity, or creating unity and trust. These strategies may strive to change institutions at the meso-level and “fix” individuals at the micro level.
For example, Starbucks recently closed its stores for bias training. It is estimated that companies invest $8 billion annually on diversity training, with 67 percent of all U.S. organizations and 74 percent of Fortune 500 companies utilizing such training. These organizational change efforts may also involve diversity leadership positions, vision statements, and/or strategic plans that emphasize the inclusion of racial minorities, women, and other underrepresented or disadvantaged groups.
Such organizational change strategies are often ineffective because of formal and informal resistance to any change that threatens to rearrange the macro racial hierarchy; in other words, a threat to dismantle white supremacy. This may be partly why organizational research examining these institutional change strategies has led to mixed results. For example, some research has found efforts to be detrimental, some have found positive effects, and some have found no effect at all. Sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev found that diversity training – despite billions of dollars invested – leads to lower representation of racial minorities in management when looking at aggregate organizational data at over 700 firms. However, they note the limitation of looking at organizational level datasets alone: we can’t get into the “minds of individual decision makers” to observe the psychological processes of how these interventions are influencing beliefs and behaviors.
This Article fills in this gap in the sociological literature by investigating both whether different types of organizational strategies get positive or negative effects, and most importantly, why particular types of interventions may have positive or negative effects. For example, positive behavioral changes may occur because of greater accountability, engagement, or positive beliefs about inclusion. Yet negative effects may occur if organizational strategies prime negative racial stereotypes or threaten the racialized hierarchy and white privileges that exist in business, education, healthcare, the justice system, and other contexts. This article examines the social psychology of inclusion by investigating the mechanisms that may mediate workplace behaviors.