Suchergebnisse

It is a popular assumption that women and racial minorities who are numeric minorities in high-prestige work groups will advocate for a demographically similar other as a potential work group peer. However, these individuals may face special challenges in fulfilling this role. We discuss how three factors—the general social status associated with a specific demographic characteristic, the demographic composition of the work group, and the differential prestige accorded within organizations to work groups—interact to impact individuals' concerns about being considered valued members of work groups to which they belong (i.e., value threat). Based on an integration of sociological and psychological theories, we argue that value threat adversely affects individuals' propensity to support demographically similar others in selection and promotion processes. We identify three forms that value threat may take in situations involving such personnel decisions: collective threat, favoritism threat, and competitive threat, and we specify factors that may shape the intensity of each form.

A diversity education dilemma occurs when exposure to information concerning status hierarchies, related to demographic and other socially salient identity groups, reinforces those hierarchies in the classroom. Discussions of diversity-related issues in a variety of management courses (e.g., immigrant issues in labor relations, the composition of executive leadership teams in strategy, workplace compliance issues in human resource management) may highlight or draw attention to status differences as individuals identify with—and are identified by others as belonging to—higher or lower status groups (e.g., based on race/ethnicity, gender, or physical disability). As a consequence, the "real world" status hierarchy is strengthened within the classroom with negative consequences for student learning. This study uses status characteristics theory to provide a framework for understanding ways in which one's best-intended practices may be undermining student learning. The authors also propose a series of practical ways that instructors can mitigate the status hierarchy to create a more equitable learning environment while simultaneously tackling issues related to diversity.

A purported downside of social category diversity is decreased relationship focus (i.e., one's focus on establishing a positive social bond with a coworker). However, we argue that this lack of relationship focus serves as a central mechanism that improves information processing even prior to interaction and, ultimately, decision-making performance in diverse settings. We introduce the construct of premeeting elaboration (i.e., the extent to which individuals consider their own and others' perspectives in the anticipation of an interaction) and explore its link with social category diversity and relationship focus. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that when disagreement occurs, social category diversity increases premeeting elaboration, with relationship focus as a central causal mechanism. Experiment 3 shows that premeeting elaboration has important implications for performance: disagreeing dyads with social category diversity elaborate more prior to meeting and, as a result, perform better on a decision-making task than those with social category homogeneity. We discuss the value of studying early-stage interaction and propose a reconsideration of the "downside" of social category diversity.