Resources for Workplace Diversity: An Annotated Practitioner Guide to Information

[Excerpt] We are pleased to offer this updated edition of Resources for Workplace Diversity: An Annotated Practitioner Guide to Information, a unique offering of The Workplace Diversity Network. Our goal is to assemble a selected, annotated list of compelling and useful resources available to help diversity practitioners create organizations that are diverse and productive. As a working group, we agreed that useful resources would include newly published books as well as historic, seminal works that provide insight and illumination irrelevant of their age. In the updated edition, we’ve expanded existing sections, added new ones and referenced online access where possible. Designed with practitioner needs in mind, Resources for Workplace Diversity is meant to be an evolving document, one that will grow according to the needs and recommendations of its users. To capture the advantage of networking, we invite you to suggest additional resources that you have found to be valuable

Surviving Work in the UK

This eBook is made up of a series of blogs by practitioners and thinkers in the field of workplace relations to think about how to make friends and influence people in a context of precarious work serialised through the LSE’s Business Review

How do mid-level leaders communicate with white collar workers in a multi-national setting?

Managing employees from different cultural and national backgrounds within international business organizations is one of the greatest challenges that mid-level leaders face in the new millennium because of the broad range of communication difficulties that can arise (Cox, 1991; Cupach & Imahori, 1993; Fitzsimmons, 2013; Ietto-Gillies, 2005; Lisak & Erez, 2015; Oliveira, 2013). The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine and evaluate the effectiveness of the communication strategies and tactics of mid-level leaders in one major multinational company with a sizable multinational workforce, Saudi Aramco. The theoretical framework for this study was Communication Accommodation Theory (e.g., Giles, 2014; Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991, 2007). The principal survey instrument employed was the Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire (Downs & Hazen, 1977). Only 7 demographic variables (education, age, gender, nationality match, language match, income, and duration of time with the company) had any significant correlations with the Seven Dimensions Of Communication Satisfaction proposed by Downs and Hazen (1977), but the strength of all those correlations was weak, with the exception of education. The more education the participants had, the more satisfied they were with their job. Interestingly, in a culture in which gender differences play such an important role, there were no significant differences by gender in the workforce at Saudi Aramco. It was notable however, that the most satisfied employees were those who had been at the company the longest. National and language differences also played almost no role in employee satisfaction, most likely because the whole workforce is fluent in English. The employees did place some significance on what Suchan (2014) describes as Arabic styles of persuasion, which favor: (a) the use of repetition and paraphrasing to make a point, (b) the use of highly ornate and metaphoric language, and (c) the use of strong emotion. Finally, in comparing the employees’ responses to Goleman’s (2000) Six Styles of Leadership, the researcher discovered that the workers at Saudi Aramco relate most of all to Goleman’s affiliative, coaching, and democratic leadership styles

Positive psychological capital to help combat the mental health fallout from the pandemic and VUCA environment

The major purpose of this article is to provide valuable insights and specific guidelines into how the now established “Positive Psychological Capital” or simply PsyCap can help prevent, treat, and sustainably recover from the current mental health global challenges. Specifically, we propose and demonstrate how PsyCap can play a realistic alternative, supplementary, non-stigma role in fighting the dramatically increasing mental illness due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) environment. Moreover, our hope is the evidence based PsyCap perspective and approach presented in this article will have a spillover effect on improving performance and especially well-being of individuals, teams, and families long after the coronavirus pandemic is over

A Biblical-Covenantal Perspective on Organizational Behavior & Leadership

WHAT IS A WORLDVIEW? For starters, it’s important to recognize that our view on organizational behavior, and indeed on life itself, is influenced by our worldview. A worldview is an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual framework by which every person views reality, makes sense of life, and applies meaning to every area of life. Everyone has a worldview, but the sad fact is that most people don’t really know that they have one, or how their unspoken assumptions about truth, meaning, values, and humanity influence every decision they make and every perception they have. As a result, most people’s worldviews are undeveloped, which means that most people are making decisions based not upon a coherent view of reality and life, but more likely an unclear, hodge-podge collection of vaguely defined and unverified assumptions about life. If we want to be effective leaders and managers in our organizations, and even more importantly, if we want to be successful human beings, shouldn’t we know what we believe and why we believe it

TEAM DIVERSITY MANAGEMENT IN SPORTS: the phenomenon of ethnic subgrouping problems and real cases analysis

Globalization is nowadays a pervading phenomenon in our society. Consequently, people from all cultures and places migrate in order to find better living and working opportunities. This causes a cultural mix present in basically every group, neighborhood and city around the world. This diversity, in terms of culture, languages, sex and age, needs to be managed properly in order to give proper and efficient results both for the people and the organisations. The diversity just mentioned is even more present in the sport sector, where results are measured in terms of performance and wins, thus it is an aspect to be looked at carefully. Among groups, subgroups are naturally to be formed, even more if they're driven by cultural or social reasons, namely "cliques". This work aim at investigate and interprete causes and consequences of the formation of ethnic subgroups within the teams through a literature review and some real cases, presented through a qualitative analysis

Accountability as a Debiasing Strategy: Testing the Effect of Racial Diversity in Employment Committees

Congress passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the primary goal of integrating the workforce and eliminating arbitrary bias against minorities and other groups who had been historically excluded. Yet substantial research reveals that racial bias persists and continues to limit opportunities and outcomes for racial minorities in the workplace. Because these denials of opportunity result from myriad individual hiring and promotion decisions made by vast numbers of managers, finding effective strategies to reduce the impact of bias has proven challenging. Some have proposed that a sense of accountability, or “the implicit or explicit expectation that one may be called on to justify one’s beliefs, feelings, and actions to others,” can decrease bias. This Article examines the conditions under which accountability to a committee of peers reduces racial bias and discrimination. More specifically, this Article provides the first empirical test of whether an employment committee’s racial composition influences the decision-making process. My experimental results reveal that race does in fact matter. Accountability to a racially diverse committee leads to more hiring and promotion of underrepresented minorities than does accountability to a homogeneous committee. Members of diverse committees were more likely to value diversity, acknowledge structural discrimination, and favor inclusive promotion decisions. This suggests that accountability as a debiasing strategy is more nuanced than previously theorized. If simply changing the racial composition of a committee can indeed nudge less discriminatory behavior, we can encourage these changes through voluntary organizational policies like having an NFL “Rooney Rule” for hiring committees. In addition, Title VII can be interpreted to hold employers liable under a negligence theory to encourage the types of changes that yield inclusive hires and promotions

Unlocking the gender diversity-group performance link: the moderating role of relative cultural distance

PurposeThis study aims to shed light on the relationship between gender diversity and group performance by considering the moderating role of relative cultural distance. Drawing from the categorization-elaboration model (CEM), the authors hypothesize that gender-diverse collaborative learning groups perform better when a low level of relative cultural distance in country-level individualism-collectivism or power distance exists among group members.Design/methodology/approachTo test this hypothesis, the authors conducted a study on 539 undergraduate students organized into 94 groups. The assessment of group performance was based on scores given by external raters.FindingsThe authors found that relative cultural distance significantly moderated the gender diversity-group performance relationship such that gender diversity was positively related to group performance when the collaborative learning group included members who similarly valued individualism-collectivism or power distance (i.e. relative cultural distance was low) and was negatively related to group performance when the collaborative learning group comprised members who differently valued individualism-collectivism or power distance (i.e. relative cultural distance was high).Originality/valueThis study contributes to understanding when gender diversity is positively associated with group performance by expanding the range of previously examined diversity dimensions to include relative cultural distance in country-level individualism-collectivism and power distance

The Intercultural Workplace: An Emirati Perspective

The diverse environment of workplaces in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) means that Emirati employees find themselves in daily contact with people from a wide range of different cultures. One prominent outcome of this scenario is that the potential for intercultural misunderstanding and miscommunication between the local population and expat employees increases. This applied research investigation proposes to explore the most common areas of cultural misunderstanding in a higher education institution in the UAE from the perspective of Emirati nationals and to examine the role education plays in raising awareness of cultural issues of both Emiratis and expat employees. In this qualitative research project, 16 working professionals of both genders in varying positions were interviewed. With one exception, they were all either employees or graduates of the same higher education institution. Of the many facets and aspects of culture that were discussed, stereotyping, gender, language and a lack of future preparedness for international work environments were the emergent themes to which more attention needs to be given. Confronting these issues, this study suggests implementing a mandatory intercultural communication component at all levels of education, a needs analysis for new Emirati employees that would focus on culture-specific training needs, an on-site language support for new hires, creating a cross-cultural buddy system and building multicultural teams