On the Barriers to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Organizations
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Management
First Advisor
Kraus, Michael
Abstract
A common perspective on organizations is that they are largely meritocratic entities wherein people earn rewards, raises, and promotions based on the quality of their work performance. However, an alternative perspective on organizations asserts that inequality and racism are pervasive in American society writ large and persist even in organizations dedicated to cultivating fair and meritocratic cultures. Indeed, despite a history of policies imposed to create diverse and equitable organizations (Castilla, 2008; Kalev et al., 2006), as well as recently-renewed organizational efforts to move toward a more antiracist society, progress toward these noble goals remains elusive (Dobbin et al., 2011; Kraus et al., 2017; Opie & Roberts, 2017). Racially minoritized employees remain underrepresented in high-status roles and organizations (Del Río & Alonso-Villar, 2015; Tomaskovic-Devey et al., 2006), despite the amount of time, resources, and money put forth to attempt to create more inclusive workplaces where meritocracy can become reality. This meritocratic conception of organizations, contrasted with a history of underrepresentation and inequity, has important consequences that I explore in this dissertation. In Chapter 1, I explore how this belief in meritocracy results in perceptions of organizational racial progress that outstrip reality. In Chapters 2 and 3, I explore how the embedding of meritocratic norms of objectivity can disproportionately affect racially minoritized employees, with implications for hiring and scholarship.In the first paper of this dissertation, I find evidence that American workers largely overestimate organizational racial progress and believe that organizational progress will naturally improve over time. Furthermore, these misperceptions pose a barrier to making our organizations more diverse and meritocratic: I find that overestimates of organizational racial progress are associated with a belief in the effectiveness of ineffective DEI policies. That is, the more people believe in this inaccurate narrative of automatic, natural racial progress, the more they are likely to believe that DEI policies lacking substance (e.g., stated commitments) or empirical evidence (e.g., racial bias training) are actually contributing to our efforts to increase the share of racially minoritized leaders. In the second and third paper in this dissertation, I investigate how commitment to merit-based norms in organizations (i.e., objectivity) creates less racially-inclusive environments. In the second paper, I study White evaluators’ perceptions of racially marginalized applicants’ objectivity and hireability in a field where objectivity is considered imperative: journalism. I find that White perceivers rate racially minoritized journalists as less objective compared to White journalists, even as they are perceived as more hireable. Overall, the studies from this paper illuminate the costs of marginalization in primarily-White workplaces, even when there are apparent hiring advantages, and demonstrate potential barriers to inclusion and accurate racial issues coverage in supposedly meritocratic workplaces. In the third paper, I examine the consequences of objectivity norms directly in a mixed-methods investigation of racially marginalized scholars in academia. In interview data, I find that racially marginalized scholars studying racial issues receive a variety of interrogations to their objectivity and, in response, are likely to engage in self-presentational strategies to avoid the potentially negative consequences of being perceived as lacking objectivity. Archival data provide convergent evidence that racially marginalized scholars engage in these self-presentational techniques in ways that pose a fundamental barrier to their inclusion in racial scholarship. Overall, these papers employ complex designs that span across qualitative and quantitative methodologies, bringing to bear insights from sociology, social psychology, and organizational behavior to forge an integrative understanding of how a meritocratic conception of organizations creates barriers on our path to racial progress. In doing so, I hope to provide a strong theoretical contribution to the often inscrutable literature on diversity and inclusion and guide managers forward with practical implications to foster organizational cultures that are truly meritocratic.
Recommended Citation
Torrez, Brittany R., "On the Barriers to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Organizations" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1025.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1025
