DEI Flashcards
Nkomo (2021)
Summary: There has been a lack of significant progress
toward positioning race as a core analytical concept in mgmt and org studies. There is still much to do to elevate race to a
significant analytical concept in MOS.
Major Contribution 1: Epistemic violence to reject inclusion of issue on race and minority issues
Major Contribution 2: We need to take an intersectional approach to understand race/gender/class in concert in org studies.
Major Contribution 3: Orgs’ abilities to acquire resources are shaped by race, and org identities are currently studied absent of considering race.
Thomas & Ely (1996)
Summary: Three diversity paradigms that have evolved over time.
Major Contribution 1: Discrimination-and-Fairness
Major Contribution 2: Access-and-Legitimacy
Major Contribution 3: Learning-and-Effectiveness
Ely and Thomas (2020)
Summary: Critiques a broad cooptation of their original learning-and-effectiveness paradigm as overly focused on the “business case” and not focused at all on the inherent value of diversity to individuals and orgs.
Major Contribution 1: Increasing numbers of URG and “stirring” does not produce the effects that most claim it does.
Major Contribution 2: leaders must embrace a broader vision of success that encompasses
learning, innovation, creativity, flexibility, equity, and human dignity.
Major Contribution 3: studies have shown that
making the economic case diminishes people’s sense
that equality is itself important, limits socially conscious
investors’ ability to promote it, and may even increase bias.
Furthermore, focusing on financial benefits sends a message
to traditionally underrepresented employees that they are
worth hiring and investing in only because having “their
kind” in the mix increases the firm’s profitability.
Yadav and Lenka (2020)
Summary: Systematic review of the diversity literature.
Major Contribution 1: Mixed views between diversity as a challenge to be addressed or an opportunity for flourishing and advancement.
Major Contribution 2: Most studies focus on gender and age (other categories emerging) and most studies are done in lab or class settings.
Major Contribution 3: Common consequences:
individual level = turnover inention, job satisfaction, performance
group-level = performance, team turnover, satisfaction
org-level = performance, commitment, competitiveness
Tsui (1992)
Summary: Relational demography theory
Major Contribution 1: Whites and men showed larger negative
effects for increased unit heterogeneity than nonwhites
and women.
Major Contribution 2: proposes that demographic attributes within work units will highly influence an individual’s behavior and
attitudes.
Major Contribution 3:
Varty (2022)
Summary: Explores the relationship between diversity statements and perceived organizational attraction.
Major Contribution 1: The known presence of common diversity statements leads people to be skeptical of their authenticity and undermines org attractiveness.
Major Contribution 2: This dynamic was especially true when statements emphasized the business case for diversity rather than social responsibility.
Major Contribution 3: Practical implication – diversity signaling can actually backfire if it is not executed in an authentic way.
Roberson et al. (2024)
Summary: Increased prevalence of diversity commitments has been met with critiques from both sides – from one side, being too “woke” and from another side, being performative acts meant to boost reputation and resource acquisition capabilities.
Major Contribution 1: Develop a typology for characterizing diversity management performativity: figurative, representative, narrative, conclusive. Based on level of specificity and scope of communications and investments.
Major Contribution 2: Diversity commitments may vary to the extent that leadership and decisionmakers see DEI and business interests as congruent or competing, desire to gain legitimacy, etc.
Major Contribution 3: Echoes Ely and Thomas (2020) that measures of successful initiatives go beyond organization-level profits and productivity.
Smith and Griffiths (2022)
Summary: Subtle Slights at work
Major Contribution 1: Authors split into microaggressions, everyday discrimination, and workplace incivilities.
Major Contribution 2: Question from me – is it worth treating these as separate issues? Especially microaggressions and everyday discrimination, which are both ID-based.
Major Contribution 3: Can lead to serious outcomes like depression, PTSD, sleep loss, nicotine use, weight gain.
Ogunyemi et al. (2020)
Summary: Systematic lit review on microaggressions. Targets of change = attitudes, cognition, emotions, behavior.
Major Contribution 1: Biculturalism = the constant and stressful navigation between two separate cultures based on one’s social and cultural identity.
Major Contribution 2: Institutional microaggressions deal with an institution’s responsibility in creating environments that send signals based on identity categories like race, class, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
Major Contribution 3: Victims of microaggressions experience significant psychological distress, and cope with things such as engagement, self-efficacy, dispositional forgiveness, and improved social connectedness.
Tepper et al. (2004)
Summary: Looks at interpretations of OCB in the context of abusive leadership.
Major Contribution 1: When abusive leadership is present, OCB is perceived negatively. Interpreted as a betrayal.
Major Contribution 2: Parallel to DEI climate – can see where ppl would negatively view active contributors to a climate that is toxic or hostile.
Noon (2018)
Summary: Argues that unconscious bias training does not take into account the type of racism it tries to address and over-emphasizes individual agency.
Major Contribution 1: Blatant racism cannot be addressed by implicit bias training – the bias is explicit and not a source of surprise or shame. So this training does not help address the actions of the most harmful actors.
Major Contribution 2: Some trainings can solidify beliefs and lead to backlash.
Major Contribution 3: UBT ignores sociological and background contexts.
Richard et al. (2021)
Summary: Exploring racial diversity congruence in upper and lower management.
Major Contribution 1: Found that congruence between levels of management positive impacts firm productivity (especially congruence in the high level)
Major Contribution 2: When not congruent, firms w/ higher levels of diversity in upper management outproduced firms w/ higher levels in lower management.
Major Contribution 3: Uses productivity as a DV, Blau’s index of heterogeneity as an IV.
Dennissen et al. (2020)
Summary: Applies an intersectionality lens to single category diversity networks.
Major Contribution 1: Challenges as “one size fits all” approach to diversity, in which identity groups are considered as homogeneous and intersectional identities are ignored.
Major Contribution 2: Found that those with multiple disadvantaged identities are marginalized in diversity networks.
Major Contribution 3: Concepts of structural intersectionality (possession of multiple, intersectional identities) and political intersectionality (collaboration and coalition building between social identity groups around agendas and movements
Wu et al. (2022)
Summary: Looks at gender diversity in the top management team (TMT) and board of directors (BOD)
Major Contribution 1: Interaction effect. Innovation is greatest when both TMT and BOD gender diversity are high.
Major Contribution 2: The effect on innovation improves firm performance, particularly in dynamic environments.
Major Contribution 3: Looks at not TMT and BOD independently, but the interdependence and multiplicative effects of their alignment (or not).
Bernstein et al. (2020)
Summary: Develops a practice-based Theory of Generative Interactions across diversity that builds on empirical findings and conceptual frameworks from multiple fields.
Major Contribution 1: in order to facilitate inclusion, multiple types of exclusionary dynamics
(self-segregation, communication apprehension, and stereotyping and stigmatizing) must be overcome through adaptive
cognitive processing and skill development, and engagement in positive interactions must occur in order to facilitate inclusion
that is created and sustained by contextually relevant sets of organizational practices
Major Contribution 2: conditions for generative interactions: pursuing an important, shared organizational purpose, mixing diverse
members frequently over protracted periods of time, enabling difering groups to have equal standing and insider status in
contributing to success, and providing collaborative interdependence, interpersonal comfort, and self-efficacy
Major Contribution 3: Echoes of Allport (1954) and the explicit acknowledgement that representation alone does not produce positive effects and can in fact produce negative ones.
Beji et al. (2021)
Summary: Board diversity in general is a positive predictor of CSR performance, but the specific elements of diversity influence different facets of CSR (corp gov, human rights, env activism, community involvement)
Khemakhen et al. (2022)
Summary: Looks at gender diversity on BOD COMMITTEES and propensity to disclose ESG scores.
Major Contribution 1: Influence of gender diversity on both the board and specifically on board committees positively predicts ESG disclosures. Presence on the committee is stronger than presence on the board itself.
Boulouta (2013)
Summary: Link between board gender diversity and corporate social performance
Major Contribution 1: board gender diversity significant affects CSP.
Major Contribution 2: especially effects the “concerns” part of KLD (e.g. preventing something bad from happening, rather than actively starting something good)
Major Contribution 3: Draws on social role theory and feminist ethics literature
Roberson et al. (2023)
Summary: Provides a process model for diversity training. “Developments in the science and practice of diversity training have been outpaced by shifts in work environments that have accentuated identity-based differences and complicated interaction across dimensions of difference”
Major Contribution 1: Embedding diversity training within broader diversity initiatives.
Major Contribution 2: Provides frameworks for training three types of personas (Defensive, Anxious, and Overconfident)
Major Contribution 3: Training is an iterative process and outcomes decay over time, so it must be built into mainstream organizational operations and practices.
Liu (2022)
Summary: Epistemic resistance for unlearning whiteness as a norm in the discipline.
Major Contribution 1: In management studies, whiteness is learnt through the discipline’s epistemic norms and conventions, received
intellectual history, conceptual canon, driving logics and institutional frameworks
Major Contribution 2: “Seen invisibility” = nonwhite people are seen as objects of voyeurism, but absent as legitimate contributors to the body of knowledge. (Citing minority scholars = atheoretical)
Major Contribution 3: epistemic revolution must entail continual reflexive interrogation, holding space for the diverse standpoints and voices with anti-racist and decolonial movements,
and led by the interests and needs of our most marginalised members.
Phillips et al. (2022)
Summary: Review of the literature in how race and gender inequity are conceptualized in organizations. Broad argument that focusing on deficit framing ignores many of the mechanisms that produce and perpetuate inequality.
Major Contribution 1: Finds an overwhelming deficit and disadvantage framing in race and gender inequality, which they argue paints an incomplete picture of sources and solutions of inequality. Framing = women deviating from expectations, as opposed to men benefitting from unfair system.
Major Contribution 2: Lit on attractiveness, nepotism, social class all used advantage frames.
Major Contribution 3: AUthors identify helping, permissiveness, structural advantages are common in the advantage framing literature and may be effectively used in race and gender discussions.
Prasad (2023)
Summary: Study of “The Chair” exploring model minorities in the context of double consciousness and the leadership conundrum.
Major Contribution 1: Model minority = Asian American subgroups who have access to high levels of ethnic capital, and the (tangible/intangible) resources that ethnic capital bestows). Comes with processes of social comparison and disengagement from ethnicity.
Major Contribution 2: Double consciousness as model minority – limited scope of actions, negation of achievements, microaggressions. Leadership conundrum – glass cliff, soft power, ethic of care.
Major Contribution 3: Solutions = relying on institutionalized metrics (as opposed to discretionary measures) and establishing allyship w other racialized minorities.
Mobasseri et al. (2023)
Summary: Develops theory about the persistence of racial inequality in U.S. organizations – where persistence of inequality is rooted in work contexts that conflate merit with idealized images of white masculinity.
Major Contribution 1: Organizational members “animate and protect institutional features that help protect them” – deal with internal conflict of shortcomings by assigning the external shortage of meritorious minorities.
Major Contribution 2: Costs of this system – alienates people [men specifically] from themselves and from others, distracts from the real objectives of organizations.
Major Contribution 3: Potential solutions = developmental organizing, and holding environments (both intergroup and intragroup) = identity workspaces, owning anxieties and fears.
DiTomaso (2021)
Summary: Drawing on historical, institutional, and structural accounts of intergroup relations to show the relevance of the past in shaping the present.
Major Contribution 1: Diversity has always been and continues to be associated with hierarchy – particularly along lines of race.
Major Contribution 2: Diversity and inequality are embedded through long processes of institutionalization – patterns of actions, belief systems, rules of behavior. External forces and individual actors combine to maintain the social order.
Major Contribution 3: Intergroup relations are always subject to politics, social change, and possibility of deinstitutionalization. Understanding DEI requires multilevel analysis. A lack of this analysis is a form of epistemological ignorance.
