A New Conflict-Resolution Model to Advance DEI

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Organizations that manage tensions constructively can create and sustain change.

Racism, misogyny, classism, xenophobia — when these chronic problems afflict organizations, they stem from a constellation of forces, not a single attitude, act, or outdated norm. As a result of that complexity, solutions can be elusive, and we often see intransigence even in places explicitly committed to change.

Take, for example, our home institution of Columbia University, which invested more than $200 million over two decades to enhance diversity and inclusion among its faculty. Given that level of commitment and the school’s progressive values, the administration was quite stunned when a self-study revealed a stubbornly slow pace of change and an environment where “women and minority professors … navigate numerous inequities … in a workplace that isn’t conducive to their success.”1 Persistent grievances included harassment of women faculty members, fear of retaliation for reporting incidents of harassment and discrimination, cronyism, and a cryptic and biased tenure and promotion system. In addition, women and members of underrepresented groups said that they were tasked with an unfair share of committee work and other “invisible labor” and that their contributions were undervalued. Though well intended, the school’s efforts clearly hadn’t addressed the root issues.

This problem certainly isn’t unique to academic settings. Organizations large and small with mostly homogenous leadership teams, across sectors and industries, struggle to make headway with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Research shows that dozens of factors interact to create change-resistant institutional cultures, which further complicate matters.2 At the individual level, for instance, factors such as implicit biases, stereotyping, ethnocentrism, and homophily (our attraction to people who are similar to us) can work together to shape our perceptions and behaviors. Between groups, selective perception of bias-confirming information about outgroups can elicit hostile responses (from both “us” and “them”), resulting in self-fulfilling prophecies.3 And those experiences, in turn, can lead to more competitive and destructive intergroup interactions — one of the many vicious cycles at play.

Within organizations where leadership is essentially monocultural, conflicts over individual and group differences are often suppressed, and leaders may be blind to the dominant power structures and stereotyping that exacerbate those differences.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

REFERENCES (20)

1. A. June, “What Factors Hold Back the Careers of Women and Faculty of Color? Columbia U. Went Looking for Answers,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 18, 2018, www.chronicle.com.

2. See summary of research findings at P.T. Coleman, D. Coon, R. Kim, et al., “Promoting Constructive Multicultural Attractors: Fostering Unity and Fairness From Diversity and Conflict,” The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 53, no. 2 (June 2017): 180-211.

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