Spotlighting Threat: Unpacking Public Scrutiny, Intergroup Dynamics and Reactance Organisational Diversity Initiatives in a Public Sector Workface
7 May 2024
09:30 -11:00
Times are shown in local time.
Open to: All
Room W4.05 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Organisational Behaviour seminar
Speaker: Professor Corinne Bendersky, UCLA
About the seminar topic
We study negative reactions to organisational diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) efforts that are motivated by intense media scrutiny of organisations’ intergroup hierarchies in the wake of national social justice movements (for example, #MeToo and BLM). In a multi-method field study of a city’s public-sector workforce, we discovered that the DEIB efforts of the police and fire departments, which were subject to intense media scrutiny about racial and gender inequities, were perceived as much more threatening than they were in the other 42 departments (for example, the library, airport, and zoo) whose intergroup hierarchies were not under as strong an external spotlight. Our data indicate that dominant group members (men and White Americans) and some marginalised group members (women and People of Color) in the heavily-scrutinised departments interpreted DEIB efforts as threats to the stability of the departmental intergroup hierarchies.
This made members of dominant groups’ privileged positions feel insecure and generated more negative downstream workplace climate experiences (psychological safety, procedural fairness, and social exclusion) for members of both dominant and marginalised groups than for their peers in the less-scrutinised departments. Our findings help us understand how societal-level phenomena and organisation-level characteristics jointly shape employees’ perceptions of DEIB efforts, and how those perceptions impact generalised workplace climate outcomes in ways that can help practitioners manage DEIB threats.
Speaker bio
Professor and Area Chair of Management and Organisations Corinne Bendersky is an expert in workplace conflict, status, justice, and diversity and inclusion in teams and organisations. Bendersky’s research contributes to both academic knowledge and organisational practice.
In recent projects, Bendersky has conducted a workplace DEIB cultural assessment of the public sector employees of the City of Los Angeles, developed interventions to reduce the gender bias experienced by women who work in extremely male-dominated professions, like the US fire service, and has been using machine learning techniques to study how working women have been represented in the news media since the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963 through the #MeToo movement in 2018, and examined the financial impact of the CA women on boards of directors’ mandate.
Bendersky teaches in all of UCLA Anderson’s MBA programmes and in many of its executive education programmes. As faculty director of the UCLA human resources roundtable known as HARRT, Bendersky engages with a mix of academic, consultant and practitioner knowledge of cutting-edge human resources topics with the roughly 50 corporate HR executives who are members. As founder of Morpho Leadership Development, she consults with corporate and public service agency executives, particularly on conflict management, team effectiveness, and diversity and inclusion.
Register
No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.