Authors:

Ziqi Yao

Date Created:

Not specified

Course Title:

Professor:

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About Paper:

For decades, enhancing employees' work performance was considered as the most important goal in organizations. However, as the workforce became increasingly diverse, many organizations started to pursue the goal of recruiting and maintaining a diverse group of employees. To help organizations make decisions related to these two goals, research in Industrial-Organizational Psychology has been focusing on the tradeoff between performance and diversity when using different predictors in selection and recruitment. However, little work has examined how lay people think about these two goals. This is important because individuals' perceptions of these goals may influence their support toward organizational diversity policies. To address this gap, we drew on the goal conflict literature in motivation science, and proposed that people have different beliefs about the conflict between performance goal and diversity goal: inherent conflict and/ or resource conflict beliefs. We conducted an online survey (n = 157) to examine if people have these two beliefs and whether they could predict people's attitudes and behaviors toward organizational diversity management. Results showed that resource and inherent conflict beliefs were two separate dimensions. Those with higher inherent, but not resource, conflict belief supported more integrating strategy and less avoiding or choosing strategy in managing performance and diversity goals. Moreover, inherent (compared to resource) conflict belief predicted more negative attitudes toward diversity policies in organizations. Moving forward, we expect to further analyze the data, including participants' qualitative responses to our open-ended question on how companies can manage the two goals.

Source:

Purdue University / 2023

Topics:

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Co-authors:

Ziqi Yao