When Diversity Measures Are Nonequivalent: Advice for Practitioners

When addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion, researchers and organizations often focus on group differences in outcomes of interest. However, groups do not always interpret surveys in the same way, causing measurement nonequivalence. Measurement nonequivalence makes it difficult, if not impossible, to compare group differences presenting a problem for how conclusions are drawn. To better understand group differences in survey responding, the current study assessed measurement invariance across five diversity-related measures using the methods outlined by Nye and colleagues (Nye et al., 2019; Somaraju et al., 2022). Data were collected across three organizations (N = 732) from different industries (i.e., healthcare, construction, information technology). Results indicate that for all five measures, there was significant measurement nonequivalence across organizations such that all but the referent item were found to be nonequivalent. We also examined measurement invariance across race and gender where all measures in all organizations were nonequivalent. Interestingly, these effects were not similar across organizations. The construction company had strong gender effects across measures (dMAC = -.64 to -.13), but weak racial effects (dMAC = -.08 to .34). In contrast, the healthcare company had relatively stronger racial effects (dMAC = -.62 to -.35) than gender (dMAC = -.43 to -.01). The information technology company had low effects for both race (dMAC = -.29 to .04) and gender (dMAC = -.20 to .09). Given these results, there are several implications for both research and practice. Researchers should not assume that samples collected across multiple organizations are equivalent and the use of hierarchically nest models may be necessary to account for group differences. Further, greater attention is needed in measurement development to ensure their validity across groups. For practitioners, we recommend utilizing open-ended survey items to better capture group differences due to the prevalence of high measurement nonequivalence in closed-items.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/gradposters2023_sciences/1001/thumbnail.jp

Does Team Leader Gender Matter? A Bayesian Reconciliation of Leadership and Patient Care During Trauma Resuscitations

OBJECTIVE: Team leadership facilitates teamwork and is important to patient care. It is unknown whether physician gender-based differences in team leadership exist. The objective of this study was to assess and compare team leadership and patient care in trauma resuscitations led by male and female physicians. METHODS: We performed a secondary analysis of data from a larger randomized controlled trial using video recordings of emergency department trauma resuscitations at a Level 1 trauma center from April 2016 to December 2017. Subjects included emergency medicine and surgery residents functioning as trauma team leaders. Eligible resuscitations included adult patients meeting institutional trauma activation criteria. Two video-recorded observations for each participant were coded for team leadership quality and patient care by 2 sets of raters. Raters were balanced with regard to gender and were blinded to study hypotheses. We used Bayesian regression to determine whether our data supported gender-based advantages in team leadership. RESULTS: A total of 60 participants and 120 video recorded observations were included. The modal relationship between gender and team leadership (β = 0.94, 95% highest density interval [HDI], -.68 to 2.52) and gender and patient care (β = 2.42, 95% HDI, -2.03 to 6.78) revealed a weak positive effect for female leaders on both outcomes. Gender-based advantages to team leadership and clinical care were not conclusively supported or refuted, with the exception of rejecting a strong male advantage to team leadership. CONCLUSIONS: We prospectively measured team leadership and clinical care during patient care. Our findings do not support differences in trauma resuscitation team leadership or clinical care based on the gender of the team leader

Questionable assumptions and the study of emergent diversity effects

Foss and Klein (2022) have written about diversity and inclusion initiatives as an emergent phenomenon connected to the actions of organizational managers. We agree that understanding the emergent effects of diversity is an important topic for study with expansive policy implications. However, Foss and Klein’s view of diversity movements and their implications appear to be based on several questionable assumptions and largely ignores or dismisses extensive micro-organizational and psychological research which already investigates these phenomena. We examine some of these assumptions and their implications and provide insight into how future research on emergent diversity effects could examine the effects of various assumptions and potential tradeoffs across organizational levels to inform policy through stronger science

What Makes a Biased Selection Process? Longitudinal and Measurement Concerns

Woo and colleagues (2022) provided a review of literature in support of using scores from the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) to select students into graduate programs. Multiple responses to their article highlight the use of alternate predictors and discuss the limitations of GRE scores with respect to content and construct validity. We introduce two additional concerns related to measurement equivalence of cognitive ability testing and its ability to consistently predict performance over time. Based on these deficiencies, we also highlight the need to revisit the fundamental criteria for defining fair predictors for individual selection decisions

When Equality Causes Inequity: A Note on Widening Wealth Disparities in Equal Selection Systems

Purpose: The primary goal of equal employment opportunity movements in the United States has been to promote fairness in hiring, promotion, and other organizational practices. This has predominantly been implemented in the form of laws and guidelines to remove biases and create equality of opportunity across protected classes. Arguments in favor of such practices include overcoming historical social disparities. However, equality of opportunity does not necessarily result in greater equality in outcomes, such as in wealth distributions. We investigate the ability of varying forms of employment opportunity to promote socioeconomic equality. Methods: Virtual experiments simulated wealth trajectories for Black and White American racial groups in both equal opportunity and quota-based selection contexts. In these experiments, wages and return on investment were held constant, and we varied initial differences in wealth. Findings: Simulations suggested that historical inequality in racial wealth distributions grow even under utopian equal opportunity selection contexts. Quota-based systems in favor of Black Americans could offset these historical inequalities. Originality: Attempts to address racial wealth inequality promote equal opportunity during selection in organizations and higher education. Although this paradigm produces fair outcomes in the short run, it cannot offset compounding differences in initial wealth disparities. Any true solution to addressing the racial wealth gap will likely involve race-based initiatives; quota-based selection systems are one such approach which can offset initial differences in wealth

A Review of Measurement Equivalence in Organizational Research: What's Old, What's New, What's Next?

The study of measurement equivalence has important implications for organizational research. Nonequivalence across groups or over time can affect the results of a study and the conclusions that are drawn from it. As a result, the review paper by Vandenberg and Lance (2000) has been highly cited and has played an important role in understanding the measurement of organizational constructs. However, that paper is now 20 years old, and a number of advances have been made in the application and interpretation of measurement equivalence (ME) since its publication. Therefore, the goal of the present paper is to provide an updated review of ME techniques that describes recent advances in testing for ME and proposes a taxonomy of potential sources of nonequivalence. Finally, we articulate recommendations for applying these newer methods and consider future directions for measurement equivalence research in the organizational literature

The Dynamic Nature of Interpersonal Conflict and Psychological Strain in Extreme Work Settings

Humanity will mount interplanetary exploration missions within the next two decades, supported by a growing workforce operating in isolated, confined, and extreme (ICE) conditions of space. How will future space workers fare in a closed social world while subjected to persistent stressors? Using a sample of 32 participants operating in ICE conditions over the course of 30-45 days, we developed and tested a dynamic model of conflict and strain. Drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory, we investigated reciprocal relationships between different forms (i.e., task and relationship) of conflict, and between conflict and strain. Results demonstrated evidence for a resource threat feedback loop as current-day task conflict predicted next-day relationship conflict and current-day relationship conflict predicted next-day task conflict. Additionally, results indicated support for a resource loss feedback loop as current-day relationship conflict predicted next-day strain, and current-day strain predicted next-day relationship conflict. Moreover, we found that job conditions affected these associations as current-day relationship conflict was more associated with next-day task conflict when next-day workload was high, but not when next-day workload was low. Similarly, current-day relationship conflict was more associated with next-day strain when next-day workload was high; however, this association decreased when next-day workload was low. Therefore, the results suggest that workload plays a critical role in weakening the effect of these spirals over time, and suggests that targeted interventions (e.g., recovery days) can help buffer against the negative impact of relationship conflict on strain and decrease the extent that relationship conflict spills over into task disputes

The I in Team: Mining Personal Social Interaction Routine with Topic Models from Long-Term Team Data

Social interaction plays a key role in assessing teamwork and collaboration. It becomes particularly critical in team performance when coupled with isolated, confined, and extreme conditions such as undersea missions. This work investigates how social interactions of individual members in a small team evolve during the course of a long duration mission. We propose to use a topic model to mine individual social interaction patterns and examine how the dynamics of these patterns have an effect on self-assessment of mood and team cohesion. Specifically, we analyzed data from a 6-person crew wearing Sociometric badges over a 4-month mission. Our results show that our method can extract the latent structure of social contexts without supervision. We demonstrate how the extracted patterns based on probabilistic models can provide insights on common behaviors at various temporal resolutions and exhibit links with self-report affective states and team cohesion.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatic