This article critiques the popular rhetoric about diversity and revisits an argument the authors made 25 years ago: To fully benefit from increased racial and gender diversity, organizations must Estimated Reading Time: 11 mins To find a controversial topic or to gather research on a topic, Opposing Viewpoints, and CQ Researcher are excellent databases to begin your research. Both databases provide full reports on topics that give Pro and Con sides of the argument in addition to background information, timelines, newspaper articles, statistics, and further blogger.com: Erica Swenson Danowitz Argumentative Essay Topics + FREE Ideas for
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This article critiques the popular rhetoric about diversity and revisits an argument the authors made 25 years ago: To fully benefit from increased racial and gender diversity, organizations must adopt a learning orientation and be willing to change the corporate culture and power structure.
Business leaders often make a business case for diversity, claiming that hiring more women or people of color results in better financial performance. Companies can benefit from diversity if leaders create a psychologically safe workplace, combat systems of discrimination and subordination, argumentative articles 2020, embrace the styles of employees from different identity groups, and make cultural differences a resource for learning and improving organizational effectiveness.
The financial impact—as proven by multiple argumentative articles 2020 this a argumentative articles 2020. These rallying cries for more diversity in companies, from recent statements by CEOs, are representative of what we hear from business leaders around the world.
They have three things in common: All articulate a business case for hiring more women or people of color; all demonstrate good intentions; and none of the claims is actually supported by robust research findings.
We say this as scholars who were among the first to demonstrate the potential benefits of more race and gender heterogeneity in organizations. This attitude encourages employees to rethink how work gets done and how best to achieve their goals.
We called this approach the learning-and-effectiveness paradigm. We argued that cultivating a learning orientation toward diversity—one in which people draw on their experiences as members of particular identity groups to reconceive tasks, products, business processes, and organizational norms—enables companies to increase their effectiveness.
We stand by the research on which that article was based, argumentative articles 2020, and we continue to advocate its conclusions. The problem is that nearly 25 years later, organizations have largely failed to adopt a learning orientation toward diversity and are no closer to reaping its benefits.
Instead, business leaders and diversity advocates alike are advancing a simplistic and empirically unsubstantiated version of the business case. They misconstrue or ignore what abundant research has now made clear: Increasing the numbers of traditionally underrepresented people in your workforce does not automatically produce benefits.
A credible and powerful case can be made, however, with three critical modifications. First, platitudes must give way to sound, empirically based conclusions. Second, business leaders must reject the notion that maximizing shareholder returns is paramount; instead they must embrace a broader vision of success that encompasses learning, innovation, creativity, flexibility, equity, and human dignity.
In this article we expose the flaws in the current diversity rhetoric and then outline what a 21st-century learning-and-effectiveness paradigm could look like—and how leaders can foster it. But those studies show correlations, not causality. In any case, the research touting the link was conducted by consulting firms and financial institutions and fails to pass muster when subjected to scholarly scrutiny, argumentative articles 2020.
Meta-analyses of rigorous, peer-reviewed studies found no significant relationships—causal or otherwise—between board gender diversity and firm performance. That could be because women directors may not differ from their male counterparts in the characteristics presumed to affect board decisions, and even if they do differ, their voices may be marginalized.
As for studies citing the positive impact of racial diversity on corporate financial performance, they do not stand up to scrutiny either.
Indeed, we know of no evidence to suggest that replacing, say, two or three white male directors with people from underrepresented groups is likely to enhance the profits of a Fortune company. They have found that it leads to higher-quality work, better decision-making, greater argumentative articles 2020 satisfaction, and more equality—under certain circumstances, argumentative articles 2020.
Moreover, advocates who justify diversity initiatives on the basis of financial benefits may be shooting themselves in the foot. Research suggests that when company diversity statements emphasize the economic payoffs, people from underrepresented groups start questioning argumentative articles 2020 the organization is a place argumentative articles 2020 they really belong, which reduces their interest in joining it.
In addition, argumentative articles 2020 diversity initiatives promise financial gains but fail to deliver, people are likely to withdraw their support for them. Still another flaw in the familiar business case for diversity is the notion that a diverse team will have richer discussions and a better decision-making process simply because it is diverse.
Under the right organizational conditions, though, employees can turn cultural differences into assets for achieving team goals. Studies have shown, argumentative articles 2020, for example, that diverse teams realize performance benefits in certain circumstances: when team members are able to reflect on and discuss team functioning; when status differences among ethnic groups are minimized; when people from both high- and low-status identity groups believe the team supports learning; and—as we reported in our earlier article—when teams orient members to learn from their differences rather than marginalize or deny them.
But absent conditions that foster inquiry, argumentative articles 2020, egalitarianism, and learning, diversity either is unrelated to or undermines team effectiveness.
When diversity initiatives promise financial gains but fail to deliver, people are likely to withdraw their support for them. Being genuinely valued and respected involves more than just feeling included. To make real progress, people—and the organizational cultures they inhabit—must change. We previously identified four actions that were helping business leaders and managers shift to a learning-and-effectiveness approach.
The first task argumentative articles 2020 those in charge is to build trust by creating a workplace where people feel argumentative articles 2020 expressing themselves freely. At no time has this need been greater in the United States than during the current unrest spurred by outrage over police brutality against Black men and women—a legacy of centuries of racism. Argumentative articles 2020 weeks into the nationwide protests that began in May, white leaders in companies across the country struggled with how to respond.
Publicly expressing support for the Black Lives Matter movement was one thing; knowing what to say to Black employees, who might already have been feeling marginalized or undervalued at work, was quite another. Leaders who were used to wielding authority grounded in their subject-matter expertise had no comparable expertise to handle the deep grief, argumentative articles 2020, rage, and despair felt by many of their employees—especially their Black employees.
And Black leaders, many with firsthand experience of police mistreatment and other forms of racial oppression, faced the challenge of managing their own strong emotions and speaking their truth without appearing biased against whites.
Yet troubling times provide opportunities for leaders to begin conversations that foster learning. In response to public acts of racial injustice, for example, white leaders can reach out from a place of vulnerability, as a way of creating connection and psychological safety, rather than staying silent from a place of privilege and self-protection.
This was the choice made by a white senior partner in a global professional services firm when he decided to convene a special virtual meeting with his teams across the country. He knew that if he said nothing about the recent racist incidents, his silence would speak for him, with a message not of neutrality but of complicity. What he astutely realized, though, was that people needed him simply to begin a dialogue, acknowledge his pain and theirs, and give them the space to talk about their experiences inside and outside the firm, if they wished.
He had no solutions, but that moment required none—just a willingness to speak from the heart and listen compassionately to whatever his colleagues might share.
Perhaps most important, he was willing to risk not getting his own argumentative articles 2020 or actions exactly right, and he was ready to receive feedback with openness and equanimity. This action calls for both individual and collective learning aimed at producing systemic change.
Companies have adopted a slew of initiatives as a result: affinity groups, argumentative articles 2020 programs, work-family accommodation policies, and unconscious-bias training, to name a few. But the sad truth is that these efforts largely fail to produce meaningful, sustained change—and sometimes even backfire. Ojima Abalaka.
Hence to dismantle systems of discrimination and subordination, argumentative articles 2020, leaders must undergo the same shifts of heart, mind, and behavior that they want for the organization as a whole and then translate those personal shifts into real, lasting change in their companies.
To argumentative articles 2020 end, a first step for leaders is to learn about how systems of privilege and oppression—racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, heterosexism—operate in the wider culture. Numerous excellent books and articles can help with this work; they have the added benefit of relieving those on the receiving end of oppressive systems from the burden of educating their majority-group counterparts, argumentative articles 2020.
And the impact can be surprising. She struck up a conversation with the man and had a moving exchange with him, eventually learning that he was the CEO of a major airline. The encounter filled her with hope: Here was a powerful executive—someone in a position to effect change—making a genuine effort to understand systemic racism. Working with hundreds of leaders over the years, we have seen how this individual learning journey can be a argumentative articles 2020 experience that often leads to individual behavioral change.
The critical final step in rooting out systems of discrimination and subordination is for leaders to use their personal experience to spur collective learning and systemic change. Such efforts require a well-articulated, widely shared organizational mission to motivate and guide change, together with a collective process of continuous reflection and consciousness-raising, experimentation, and action—followed by sustained attention, monitoring each change for impact, argumentative articles 2020, and making adjustments accordingly.
Taking a hard look at their culture, they identified a flawed approach to project assignment that was inadvertently contributing to systematic inequities. Argumentative articles 2020 projects were going disproportionately to white men; it was the old story of people having an easier time identifying talent when it comes in a package that looks like them.
When a particularly challenging project for an important client came up—the kind that can stretch and give exposure to a promising young consultant—the white male partners staffed it with their go-to people: other white men. Meanwhile, white women and people of color, despite having been recruited from the same highly competitive MBA programs as their white male counterparts, regularly were assigned the more mundane projects. They got argumentative articles 2020 doing tasks they had long ago mastered, which led many to leave the firm.
But were the go-to people actually better? When those leaders examined their developmental practices, they were chagrined to see clear patterns in who received coaching, whose mistakes were forgiven, and who got second and even third chances to prove themselves: the white men.
The third necessary action for leaders and managers involves actively trying to understand how organizational norms might implicitly discourage certain behavioral styles or silence certain voices. But either way, they violate one set of expectations, risking marginalization and diminished chances for advancement.
But all such messages communicate that these employees must be ever-mindful of how others see them in relation to stereotyped images of their group, making it harder for them to bring their talents and perspectives to the table. Companies need performance management systems that tie feedback and evaluation criteria to bona fide task requirements rather than group stereotypes.
Over the years, we have seen that learning from cultural differences is more likely to occur once the previous three actions are under way: Leaders have created trust, begun to dismantle systems of discrimination and subordination, and embraced a broad range of styles.
In exploring whether they take their star status with them when they switch firms, he found a fascinating sex difference: Unlike their male counterparts, whose performance worsened upon changing firms, women who made a move experienced no such performance drop.
The reason, Groysberg concluded, argumentative articles 2020, was that women analysts faced sex discrimination, and so they had to do the job differently from men. And so, unlike men, women built their argumentative articles 2020 on portable, external relationships with clients, companies, and the media. Not only were argumentative articles 2020 stars able to maintain their performance upon switching firms but, generally speaking, they outperformed their male peers over the nine-year period of the study.
In short, argumentative articles 2020, women were not only different; they were better. Learning from cultural differences is more likely once leaders have created trust, argumentative articles 2020, begun to dismantle systems of discrimination and subordination, and embraced a range of styles, argumentative articles 2020.
He aggressively recruited talented women for the analyst role and then set out to create the conditions that would enable them to thrive, emphasizing team culture, allowing flexible work arrangements, argumentative articles 2020 instituting systems that gave analysts regular, unbiased feedback to help them set personal improvement goals.
Additionally, he encouraged people to develop their own style and voice, argumentative articles 2020. What the research director figured out was that gender had given women analysts a unique set of experiences, and those, together with their resilience and ingenuity, led to new insights into how to do the job better. The benefits are particularly strong when the differences have been historically fraught with tension.
In a study of more than retail bank branches in the northeastern United States, we, together with Irene Padavic of Florida State University, found that the more racially diverse the branch, argumentative articles 2020, the better its performance—but only for branches in which all employees, across all racial groups, experienced the environment as conducive to learning.
Stronger relationships in turn increase resilience in the face of conflict and other stressors. In short, for culturally diverse teams, argumentative articles 2020, the experience of learning across racial differences can, argumentative articles 2020, in and of itself, improve performance. Inequality is bad for both business and society. Organizations limit their capacity for innovation and continuous improvement unless all employees are full participants in the enterprise: fully seen, heard, developed, engaged—and rewarded accordingly.
Moreover, such treatment can unleash enormous reserves of leadership potential too long suppressed by systems that perpetuate inequality, argumentative articles 2020. When the only legitimate conversation about diversity is one that links it to economic gains, we tend to discount the problem of inequality. Companies will not reap benefits from diversity unless they build a culture that insists on equality. Treating differences as a source of knowledge and connection lays the groundwork for such a culture.
Developing those capacities is no small feat in any context; it is even more challenging for people working across cultural identity differences.
Finally, while there is a business case for diversity—one that rests on argumentative articles 2020 evidence, an expansive definition of what makes a business successful, and the presence of facilitating conditions—we are disturbed by the implication that there must be economic grounds to justify investing in people from underrepresented groups.
Why should anyone need an economic rationale for affirming the agency and dignity of any group of human beings? If company profits come at the price of our humanity, argumentative articles 2020, they are costing us too much. And if diversity initiatives fail to reckon with that trade-off, they will amount to little more than rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship. You have 1 free article s left this month.
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This article critiques the popular rhetoric about diversity and revisits an argument the authors made 25 years ago: To fully benefit from increased racial and gender diversity, organizations must Estimated Reading Time: 11 mins Argumentative Essay Topics Are US elections always fair? Go through this detailed article to learn how to craft an argumentative essay effectively. Seeking help from professionals is nothing to be ashamed of, especially when your grades are at stake To find a controversial topic or to gather research on a topic, Opposing Viewpoints, and CQ Researcher are excellent databases to begin your research. Both databases provide full reports on topics that give Pro and Con sides of the argument in addition to background information, timelines, newspaper articles, statistics, and further blogger.com: Erica Swenson Danowitz
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