Managing Diversity Fairly

[Beth n Rod 1,279]

This is an excellent article which seemed timely, and in my opinion is well worth reading. Enjoy!

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Human Resources - Managing Diversity Fairly

Research By

Michael W. Morris

Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior

Stanford Graduate School of Business

Kwok Leung

Professor of Management

City University of Hong Kong

Steven Su

Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior

INSEAD

Managing diversity is everybody's business these days. Diverse work teams bring high value to contemporary organizations. Just as cross-functional task forces have long been used to reach decisions that better represent the whole organization, so diverse cultural teams and organizations offer the potential to design products and policies with broad applicability to the global economy. With increasing national and ethnic diversity in organizations, the challenge of managing fairly becomes more complex. A supervisor who interprets the actions of employees from different cultural groups without awareness of their cultural norms can miss or misread important signals in their communication. Yet, at the other extreme, a constant emphasis on employees' cultural backgrounds can often create just as many problems. Either way there may be complaints about fairness along cultural lines. What's a manager to do?

Cultural training programs have long been used to prepare managers for expatriate positions and are used increasingly for managers in ethnically diverse organizations at home. Some programs specifically aspire to teach managers to simulate how people from another culture interpret events. "It is unrealistic to expect complete success in this regard," says Stanford Graduate School of Business faculty member Michael Morris. "But training can succeed in heightening managers' awareness of the specific ways that norms of workplace behavior differ, so that the newly arrived American manager abroad won't read special meanings into employee behaviors that are culturally normal (such as siestas, kissing on the cheek, indirect eye contact, or whatever the case may be)." Another realistic goal is to remind managers that their perceptions of employees are not direct readings of objective reality but constructed interpretations— sometimes largely shaped by their cultural beliefs.

The good news is that if there is diversity in an organization, then the seeds of a more comprehensive solution are also present in that organization. The best protection against cultural misinterpretations is to implement procedures that allow managers to check their interpretations against those of culturally different others. Example: putting members of different groups into key performance-appraising positions and encouraging managers to call on those with cultural expertise much as they would call on those with technical expertise for an information technology problem.

Morris, who is an associate professor of organizational behavior at the Business School, is one of the few researchers looking at how justice can be maintained in a culturally diverse workforce. Perceptions regarding fairness have important implications for employees' respect for leaders and their willingness to contribute extra effort. "If justice issues are not well managed in a diverse workplace, detrimental consequences ranging from poor morale and high turnover to inter-group rivalry and balkanization may result," says Morris, who has collaborated on several studies in this area with Kwok Leung, professor of management at City University of Hong Kong, and Steven Su, assistant professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, as well as Daniel Ames, adjunct professor, Columbia Business School Executive MBA Program, and Brian Lickel, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Southern California.

Morris and his colleagues have paid attention to the two extremes that often guide managers in diverse work settings. They describe these extremes as the "universalist" approach to fairness (treat all employees the same) and the "particularist" approach (adjust your treatment according to the employee's cultural background). In one recent article, they demonstrate the problems that accrue with one extreme stance or the other. They also outline how a flexible stance enables solutions to a number of the challenges in maintaining perceived fairness in culturally diverse organizations.

For example, Morris says one of the critical tasks for an organization is to help employees progress and develop, especially employees who are culturally different from the prevailing management culture. "In many subtle ways, we tend to favor people who are similar to us," says Morris. "This is one of the strongest patterns in social science research." Even well-intentioned managers may make it easier for employees similar to them to perform well, such as being quicker to praise when they have succeeded or more comfortable providing constructive criticism when they have not. A manager consciously intending to adopt the universalist stance may nonetheless treat employees differently as a function of their group because of non-conscious factors shaping his or her behavior. At the other extreme, a manager adopting the particularist stance may appear overly sympathetic toward employees from underrepresented groups. This can convey lower standards of performance expectation, which may inspire resentment from all groups.

The solution, says Morris: Don't rely on good intentions. Implement policies such as a mentoring program to assure that all employees get the close relationships to managers that they need in order to access information and opportunities. Equally important is that no employees are denied the constructive critical feedback needed for learning because managers shy away from the challenge of appraising performance fairly across cultural divides. Unless managers are assigned, the employees who need mentors the most may never find one.

Whereas the aforementioned issues arise within locally diverse work settings, different issues arise for global firms in maintaining a sense of justice across different units in different countries. There is a tradeoff between universalist policies that standardize (thereby enabling managerial rotation and a unified culture), on the one hand, and particularist policies in tune with local judgments of fairness, on the other. Morris and his colleagues suggest that understanding the ways culture enters a given kind of fairness judgment can clarify how a firm should respond. Recent papers by Morris and colleagues in the journals Academy of Management Review and Applied Psychology distinguish different ways culture enters particular kinds of fairness or justice judgments and the responses organizations can take to each.

For example, judgments of "distributive justice" concern the allocation of rewards such as salary. One way that culture can enter such judgments is by determining which criterion or standard of fairness applies, such as dividing rewards in equal proportion, in proportion to "contributions," or in proportion to "needs." But even if cultures concur in their choice of criterion, differences can arise because cultures differ in how they construe contribution or need. Morris and his colleagues examine this issue with regard to an oft-noted difference in justice perceptions of American respondents as opposed to Japanese and Korean participants. They find that American respondents are more likely to judge as unfair distributions that weight employee seniority as the primary driver of salary. In evidence from many psychological measures, Morris and his coauthors find that this cultural difference arises from so-called construals, not from criteria. That is, East Asian respondents were no less wedded to the criterion of rewards proportional to contributions, it was just that they were more likely to construe seniority as a contribution. Given the nature of this difference, an organizational response could be to stress the criterion of rewards proportional to contributions in the global corporate culture, but to allow the definition of employee contribution to vary. In short, with regard to distributive justice, they should think globally, but act locally.

Overall, it is paramount not only that all cultural groups be treated fairly, but that they perceive that they are treated fairly. It can be challenging to maintain perceptions of fairness in diverse work settings as culture can affect managers in their performance appraisals and their support of employees' career development. In international organizations, challenges arise in decisions over which policies and practices to standardize across national units. Purely universalist or particularist approaches to any of these challenges seem unlikely to succeed, so managing cultural diversity fairly will require a balancing act. The more we understand about the specific ways culture influences the psychology of fairness judgments, the easier it will be to strike a wise balance.

August 2001

Justice in the Culturally Diverse Workplace: Problems of Over-Emphasis and Under-Emphasis of Cultural Differences, Kwok Leung, Steven K. Su, and Michael W. Morris, GSB Research Paper #1658, September 2000

Related Reading

Views from Inside and Outside: Integrating Emic and Etic Insights About Culture and Justice Judgment, Michael W. Morris, Kwok Leung, Daniel Ames, and Brian Lickel, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 24, April 1999

Justice for All? Progress in Research on Cultural Variation in the Psychology of Distributive and Procedural Justice, Michael W. Morris and Kwok Leung, Applied Psychology: An International Review, Vol. 49, 1999

For more information, contact Helen K. Chang, 650-723-3358, Fax: 650-725-6750

To order a paper in the GSB Research Paper Series (numbered papers only), email research_papers@gsb.stanford.edu.

http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/research/reports/2001/morris.html

[Pams Pressure & Clean 64]

We have a very extensive diversity program here...Although it may be considered a bit oversimplistic.

We treat everyone we might hire with the EXACT same set of rules..Essentially they are these...

Show up when you are told to

Do what you are told, when you are told to do it

If you screw up, it's better you tell us than try to hide it

Telling lies, stealing, violence towards anyone or anything is a one way ride to the unemployment line, the police station, or both as applicable.

We expect perfection, but tolerate excellence

Pretty simple really and the plus side is that it eliminates all the feel good, mushy, political correctness, bullcrap and saves me a bunch of paperwork.

:soapbox: :cool: :cool:

[Mathew Johnson 123]

Cujo,

I think I would like you to be my VP of Human Resources when I become a fortune 500 company. I like the way you think.

Matt

[Pams Pressure & Clean 64]

Thanks Matt...Sign me up..:cheers: :cheers: :cool: :cool:

[newlook 265]

Diversity is a topic that is seldom discussed in open forums such as this. Thank you Beth for bringing this topic to our attention.

In short....if you can do the job and qualify for it....then your hired. Screw up .... then your gone. As a general philosphy, our company does not get into the negative proclivities around diversity ~ meaning we do not tolerate any negative treatment to anyone of our workers due to their background or country of origin.

[Beth n Rod 1,279]

I believe everyone has the right to work if they are able to perform up to standard. However, performance must be measure in a fair and measurable way for all.

I also feel that there need to be job descriptions and levels of expectation set in writing so that anyone in a job understands what is expected.

It's also a good idea to have policies in place for zero tolerance where any type of descrimination is concerned, to protect both company and individual alike.

Beth

p.s. you are welcome :)

[newlook 265]

Beth -- you bring up a very important point that is sometimes overlooked by us owners relating to job descriptions and expectations within that job description.

We found ourselves in a "fickle" with one of our supervisors this past summer as it related to his/her responsibility.

Our company has seen tremendous growth over the last year. This past summer was nothing short than a "rat race" as it related to our growth. We expanded our services to other counties, locked in major contracts for commercial work and etc.etc.

We promoted people within and hired a few more individuals to offset the growth we were experiencing. During this frenzy....we failed to keep the job descriptions UP TO DATE with the work at hand. Needless to say it bite us on the butt. The supervisor was called on the "carpet" for lack of performance. Well, he/she called us on the "carpet" because we failed to put the additional responsibilities in writing. They knew what their job was because they were doing it all summer but because it was not in writing...there was nothing that our H.R. person could do except update all job descriptions.

I guess the morale of the story is to make sure that you keep your H.R. Dept. in line with any growth that you may experience.

Cheers!

[Beth n Rod 1,279]

Carlos,

We all go thru this at some point. The important thing is you caught it. We devote time every year to process improvement in many facets, and have found it to be a fantastic way to avoid growth pitfalls and to manage new growth alike.

Beth