Lynn R. OffermannKenneth Matos
Aquick look around most large organizations today is enough to illustrate how diversity in cultural, racial, educational, and other backgrounds is increasing in organizations across the country. Not only is the diversity of the American workforce better reflected at all levels in U.S. organizations, but as globalization and technology advance, the ability and need to act frequently on an international stage increases as well. For leaders, this diversity presents a new challenge to their capabilities, in that they are now charged with developing effective work relationships with people from different backgrounds, many of whom bring orientations and expectations toward leadership that may be quite different from those of their leaders.
Unfortunately, leaders have generally not been trained to deal with this kind of broad diversity. Many U.S. organizations still put more emphasis on acquiring a diverse staff than they do on assisting leaders in working with these diverse followers once on board. Yet we maintain that it is the leadership of diversity that most promises net business rewards as well as the sought-after retention of diverse staff. Current business needs call for the development of culturally intelligent leadership— leaders who are able to transcend their own cultural programming to function effectively in interactions with staff who differ from them in terms of gender, race, culture, sexual orientation, and a myriad of other possible characteristics and temperaments.[1]
This chapter addresses the needs of leaders who wish to further develop their capabilities in working with diverse staff. We begin by examining the value that leaders gain from addressing organizational diversity and the costs of ignoring it. We then examine some of the key concepts and approaches to understanding diversity in organizations that can provide a foundation for understanding and developing specific practices and initiatives. A summary of best practices for leaders of diverse organizations based on the experiences of successfully diverse organizations follows, along with a discussion of some of the most significant challenges in the implementation of diversity leadership. The chapter concludes by presenting two examples of how leaders can put these best practices to work: (1) by developing a comprehensive organizational approach to embracing diversity, and (2) by developing the capabilities of diverse staff through mentoring.
Researchers initially responded to the increase in diversity in the workforce by examining organizational demography—that is, the distributions of different demographic groups within and across organizations. From there, interest developed not in just who was in the workforce, but rather in what the implications were of having members of different subgroups working together. Based largely on work in social psychology, an approach called relational demography emerged. Relational demography theory proposes that it is the comparison of oneself with others in their work unit that can influence attitudes and behavior. In comparing self and coworkers, demographic characteristics such as gender, race, and culture are highly visible bases for categorization and for constructing social identities. Indeed, Bargh concludes that gender and race-based stereotypes are almost always activated when people form impressions of one another.[2] On the basis of these impressions, in-groups and out-groups are determined, and those perceived as being like oneself are viewed more favorably, while unfavorable attitudes and behavior may be displayed toward those perceived to be in an out-group. Thus, leaders may unconsciously respond to out-group members in a more negative fashion than to similarly performing in-group members, expecting less from them and perhaps judging their behavior more harshly. Leaders who expect little from their out-group members are likely to provide lower amounts of encouragement and support than they do to in-group members, and in turn receive lower-quality work. This further reinforces the belief that out-group members deserve less favorable treatment. Leaders who are unable to recognize and adjust their own subtle reactions early on may find themselves creating self-fulfilling prophecies whereby employees originally perceived as likely to be low performers solely on the basis of demographic differences in fact become low performers because they are treated differently.
As this example shows, the effects of these demographically based impressions and actions on the day-to-day performance of leaders and organizational groups are subtle and complex. It is therefore not surprising that the literature on workplace diversity and performance has yielded mixed results, suggesting that group diversity is a double-edged sword with the potential to increase creativity by offering different perspectives and voices at the potential expense of higher member dissatisfaction and a lack of identification with the group. A recent review of 40 years of empirical research in organizational demography and diversity concludes that unless steps are taken to counteract the negative effects, diversity is likely to impair group functioning.[3] The most commonly cited example of this impairment is increased turnover rates. Racial/ethnic dissimilarity compared to others in the group has been found to predict low commitment and intention to stay in the organization, as well as greater absenteeism.[4] Such dissimilarity has also been associated with less favorable attitudes toward the group and the perception of poorer promotion opportunities. For a diverse staff, perceived discrimination has been found to be a significant organizational stressor, affecting levels of organizational commitment and job satisfaction.[5] Dissatisfaction and stress can then lead talented staff to look elsewhere for employment.
On the other hand, the potential benefits of diversity appear at many levels. Reviews of the major benefits of attending to employee diversity have noted a reduction of costs due to decreased turnover rates among members of minority groups and broadening creativity from people with various perspectives. For example, research has shown that top management teams in multinational corporations benefit from cultural heterogeneity and can achieve better performance without a loss of cohesion.[6]
Evidence also suggests that companies that implement good diversity programs are more likely to attract and retain employees as well as create a good reputation in the market. For example, one study found that individuals examining alleged organizational recruiting materials that either did or did not feature a managing diversity program evaluated the organization with the diversity program as significantly more attractive to them.[7] This suggests that providing support for a diverse workforce may be a potent recruiting tool. As the workforce continues to diversify, maintaining a positive environment for diverse staff may differentiate those organizations able to attract and keep the best talent from those that cannot.
Successfully attending to diversity issues also appears to be good for organizational profit, with evidence that investors bid up the stock price of organizations that were recognized by the U.S. Department of Labor for their high-quality affirmative action programs, and found that announcements of discrimination settlements were associated with small but significant negative changes in stock prices.[8] Thus, the evidence strongly suggests that superior diversity management provides competitive benefits to an organization in a variety of ways.
In thinking about how organizations may best capitalize on their organizational diversity, managers and other organizational leaders are key in making diversity work for the organization’s interests. They can help staff identify with an inclusive organizational culture rather than with potentially divisive demographic in-groups such as race or gender. It falls on group and organizational leaders to bring out the best from diverse perspectives in a way that maintains positive interpersonal relations and capitalizes on the potential of staff diversity. Their position as decision and policy makers, as well as organizational role models, places leaders in an unparalleled position to guide the diversity management efforts of their organizations. For leaders, the benefits of success and the risks of failure should create potent motivation to see it in the best interests of both themselves and their organizations to develop leadership strategies for successfully using the skills of their diverse personnel. The creation of inclusive work climates is now a key concern of U.S. organizations, and will continue to be a responsibility of organizational leaders for years to come.
The starting point in most diversity research is an examination of the characteristics of people in relation to those of others around them. As mentioned earlier, demographic characteristics such as gender, race, and culture are highly visible bases for categorization and for constructing social identities. As a result, organizational interest as well as research has tended to focus on these characteristics. While by no means the only organizational diversity variables, they are the most heavily researched, generally accessible, and illustrative examples of the underlying processes of individual and organizational responses to diversity. Therefore, while much of what follows may be applicable to understanding the effects of differences in age, sexual orientation, education, socioeconomic class, and other characteristics, our discussion centers on the three characteristics of gender, race, and culture—especially focusing on culture, which we believe is understudied in U.S. organizational contexts and offers the most varied and generalizable range of examples.
Within a purely American context, gender and racial diversity have received the lion’s share of attention. Proportions of members of different groups become important in priming salient categories of group membership, making people more aware of the differences among them. For example, the literature on gender diversity in organizations suggests that the proportion of women and men in a group can have significant impact. As Kanter noted in her landmark work, individuals working where demographic distributions are highly skewed such that they are in an obvious minority tend to be more visible, are often perceived in stereotypical ways by majority group members, and become more aware of their social identity.[9] Thus, a lone White in a group of Blacks will become more aware of her racial identity, as will others in the group, than she would if she worked in a group predominantly composed of other Whites. In addition, being in a numerical minority heightens that group’s visibility in a way that may result in greater stereotyping by the majority group. Such reactions can have direct and indirect effects on the ways in which subordinates work with one another, with those in the numerical minority seen as “tokens” and treated differently than those in the majority. Hence, it is important for leaders to consider the extent of numerical dominance of specific demographic groups within their units and the likely impact of those proportions for work behavior of both majority and minority staff.
There is little doubt that people are affected by the demographic compositions of their work groups, but the literature is less clear about how and when minority status leads to specific negative outcomes. For example, in the area of gender diversity, men appear to display more negative reactions to minority status than do women, possibly because the influx of women as potential competitors for organizational opportunities is perceived as undermining the more advantageous positions men enjoyed in the past.[10] Men in the minority display lower levels of satisfaction and commitment, while women in the minority are less likely to have as great a negative reaction. This is particularly noteworthy because men in predominantly female jobs report almost no hostility from female colleagues and are socially integrated, whereas women in predominantly male organizations have reported hostility and less integration.[11] Research on the impact of race and ethnic diversity on intergroup relations shows a consistent finding that individuals who differ from the majority race are more likely to leave, have lower job satisfaction and commitment, and receive lower performance evaluations.[12] As with gender diversity, these effects have sometimes been more pronounced for whites than for minorities.
These findings are not encouraging to organizations that have no other moral, legal, or practical alternative to embracing the diversity of the workforce. However, the psychological literature offers some hope, in that the same cognitive categorization processes that can highlight differences can also generate more inclusive categories that can accommodate diverse characteristics. Organizations in which the social networks and events emphasize common goals and identities may be able to enhance group processes and performance. Other research has shown that when attempts are made to promote identification with a larger group and minimize subgroup identity, intergroup bias can be reduced. Similarly, where social categories overlap and people from different groups share membership in a common group, bias can be reduced.[13] Furthermore, research suggests that membership in multiple in-groups creates a more complex and inclusive social identity that may be associated with individuals displaying a greater tolerance of out-group members.[14] So for leaders, encouraging identification with the company rather than one’s demographic group might help people from different backgrounds become more aware of their common interests.
In addition to creating an inclusive culture promoting a common identity, leaders can be careful to see that competition for organizational resources does not escalate hostility and tension between groups. Instead, research suggests that common goals requiring intergroup cooperation can lessen tension and allow cross-group friendships to emerge. For example, members of a project team may differ in gender and race, but to the extent that they see their fates interlinked in terms of project success and resulting rewards, they may be more open to working with dissimilar others.
In addition to concerns about race and gender in the workforce, it is important to extend consideration to the integration of staff from a variety of cultural backgrounds. With the increase of globalization and multinational businesses and markets, the influence of cultural diversity increases in importance. To many non-Americans, the differences of male and female Americans of various races is often less striking or influential than the differences they note between American cultural expectations and their own. In the eyes of much of the world, Americans, Black or White, male or female, are American before they are anything else. Leaders must therefore be able to move beyond a de facto definition of diversity as a predominantly race- and gender-based construct and attend to the emerging definitions that address variance in cultural, experiential, and behavioral characteristics.
Based on his classic study of approximately 88,000 IBM employees in more than sixty countries, Hofstede proposed the following four dimensions of organizationally relevant cultural value differences: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism-collectivism, and masculinity-femininity.[15] These cultural values can be extremely helpful in understanding both leader and follower behavior worldwide. The best-known and most heavily investigated of the four dimensions is individualism-collectivism, a value that differentiates between cultures in which individual identity, goals, and personal choice are revered and those cultures in which a strong collective identity links individuals to cohesive in-groups. The United States is among the most individualistic of cultures, where leaders may allow for and expect greater individual initiative from their staff, and where culturally similar staff may expect and relish opportunities and rewards for initiative. However, in collectivistic cultures, there may be a greater emphasis on teams and discomfort with individual freedom of action. Individualists, on the other hand, may demonstrate a resistance to teamwork. Based on these differences, leaders from a collectivistic culture might find an individualist’s preference for solo projects as self-promoting and uncooperative, whereas leaders from individualistic cultures might underestimate the importance of teamwork to unit success.
Likewise, Hofstede’s concept of power distance has relevance to the study of leadership in that it deals directly with expectations of and relationships to authority. Power distance is defined as the extent to which there is an acceptance of unequal distribution of power within a culture. In low power distance cultures like the United States, leader-subordinate relations can be close and less formal in nature; in high power distance cultures these relationships are expected to be more distant and formal, based on one’s position in the hierarchy. High power distance cultures are consistent with autocratic and paternalistic management, whereas low power distance should be more compatible with managerial approachability and employee participation. Leaders from lower power distance cultures need to be aware that what they perceive as a lack of initiative from some staff may be merely the respectful waiting for instruction from the leader that would be expected in high power distance societies. Again, incompatibility between leaders and their staff may produce strain in their relationships, ranging from employee discomfort with leader expectations to leader dissatisfaction with employee performance.
Uncertainty avoidance reflects the extent to which members of a culture value predictability and find ambiguity stressful. Members of high uncertainty avoidance cultures prefer rules and stable jobs with long-term employers; members of low uncertainty cultures may be more willing to take risks, change employers, and tolerate organizational ambiguity and change. U.S. culture has traditionally been more tolerant of ambiguity, and U.S.-born leaders may expect their staff to be as well. Staff from high uncertainty avoidance cultures may expect their leaders to exert and keep control (certainty) in their work units, thereby avoiding change, whereas staff from low uncertainty avoidance cultures may be more comfortable with change, and expect their leaders to give them more latitude in behavior. Thus, a one-style-fits-all leadership approach is not going to be welcomed by all.
Finally, the masculinity-femininity dimension distinguishes between “masculine” cultures in which ambition, assertiveness, and challenge are highly valued and “feminine” cultures in which greater emphasis is placed on harmony, cooperation, and good working relationships. Masculine cultures tend to emphasize work over family and leisure, and can be associated with higher work stress compared to feminine cultures. As a result, leader demands for overtime or weekend work that might be seen as acceptable (if undesirable) to staff accustomed to masculine cultures might be viewed far more negatively by staff from more feminine cultures.
Demographic differences between leaders and their staffs have organizational consequences. Tsui and O’Reilly found that increasing differences between superior-subordinate demographic characteristics was associated with lower superior ratings of subordinate effectiveness, less attraction toward subordinates, and the experience of greater role ambiguity by subordinates.[16] In New Zealand, Chong and Thomas found higher levels of follower satisfaction when leaders and followers were ethnically similar.[17] Clearly, leaders need to make greater efforts to work more effectively with demographically dissimilar staff if organizations want to capitalize on the resources brought in by a diverse workforce. The ability to engage in the mental processes and adaptive behaviors needed to function effectively as a leader in diverse organizations is what we call culturally intelligent leadership. Culturally intelligent leadership requires a commitment to creatively combining the strengths and weaknesses of diverse staff in the service of superior organizational performance.
Regrettably, discussions of leadership in diverse contexts have often focused on the need to understand others without a comparable consideration of understanding oneself. Yet, as Hall states, “Culture hides much more than it reveals, and, strangely, it hides itself most effectively from its own participants. The real job is not to understand foreign cultures, but to understand one’s own.”[18] Although leaders may be unaware of the impact of their own culture on their behavior, followers can see it. Research by Offermann and Hellmann found that the cultural values of power distance and uncertainty avoidance held by managers related to subordinate perceptions of their manager’s leadership style.[19] As predicted, power distance was significantly and negatively associated with leader communication, delegation, approachability, and team building. These findings are consistent with the view that high power distance is associated with a greater tendency for leaders to retain power themselves rather than empower others through sharing information, building teams, and delegating. Uncertainty avoidance was significantly associated with leadership behaviors displaying control, and significantly negatively associated with delegation and approachability. Leaders valuing certainty may act on this value by exerting more control over staff and sharing less power with them.
Many people dislike the thought of being “programmed” by culture and prefer to deny the impact of the collective on individual thought and behavior. Consistent with the United States ranking as one of the most highly individualistic nations in the world, many Americans do not like being grouped into any cultural category, sometimes even denying that there is a U.S. “culture” and preferring to see their behavior as freely and individually chosen. Yet non-Americans are able to see patterns of U.S. cultural values just as Americans see those of others: primarily through differences with one’s own values. To use Hofstede’s terms, the United States is individualistic, low in power distance, low in uncertainty avoidance, and fairly masculine in orientation. This manifests itself as a culture that values individual happiness, equality, practicality, is comfortable with change, achievement oriented, and data driven.[20] This cultural heritage underlies much of U.S. management philosophy, including an emphasis on individual responsibility, individual rewards, action orientation, valuing tasks over relationships, a measurement-driven approach, and a focus on short-term gains and “quick wins,” just to name a few. It is also a cultural heritage that needs to be acknowledged and understood before trying to lead others who hold different values.
Nonetheless, leaders must be careful in interpreting such cultural effects: not all Americans share these values, nor are citizens of other nations any more universally consistent. In any culture, there will be individual variation within a country around the values of the society in general. Thus, culture should be viewed at the group level: it should not be assumed that a particular person will behave in a certain way, but rather that when a group of people from countries with a specific value orientation are averaged, that average may differ in predictable ways from averages of groups from cultures with different values. Furthermore, the pattern produced by examining multiple values simultaneously and in interaction may be more instructive than any single cultural value. Together these values yield useful information about the potential inclinations of many leaders as well as followers.
Unfortunately, many leaders are unaware of the cultural lenses they use to view the world, or how their own cultural background affects the way in which they view others. The ethnocentric tendency to use one’s own group as the standard of correctness against which all others are judged sets the stage for in-group bias. For example, as observers of staff behavior, leaders, like all of us, presumably make attributions for the causes of the behaviors observed. Psychological research on attribution theory suggests that people often make errors in attributions, the most basic of which is overestimating the importance of personal and dispositional factors as the causes of behavior and underestimating the influence of situational factors. Although these types of errors are well documented with European American samples, there is evidence that Asians may focus more on social roles, obligations, and situational constraints in making attributions and so may make fewer dispositional attribution errors than their Western counterparts.[21] If leaders make erroneous attributions for the performance of diverse followers, their behavior may also be inappropriate. Work by Offermann, Schroyer, and Green found that leader attributions about the causes of subordinate performance can affect the way in which a leader subsequently interacts with them, with leaders more behaviorally active when working with groups who they believed performed poorly due to effort (an unstable cause) rather than ability (a stable cause).[22] Based on this work, if a leader misattributes unsatisfactory performance of culturally different staff to lack of ability (rather than, say, lack of clarity about what they were supposed to do or lack of resources to get the job done), it would be predicted that the leader may give up on them and miss the opportunity to develop people who could perform well. Without the leader’s assistance, failure becomes more likely, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bias is not, however, inevitable. Effectively understanding diverse others rests on being open to a number of very different but equally effective methods of achieving organizational goals.
Many leaders begin with the view that people are people, and one style of leadership should fit all. That is, a leadership style, successful with one set of followers, should work with others, even if those others are demographically different. Many leadership approaches have historically countered by advocating tailoring style to situation, with the core aspects of the situation defined differently by different models. Unfortunately, many “tailored” theories progress to categorize followers into groups based on some commonality (such as in-group versus out-group, or level of maturity) rather than truly consider people as individuals. The temptation to try to categorize staff by culture is strong as well. Unfortunately, some diversity programs in the United States have succeeded only in teaching leaders new categorical “boxes” into which they can place staff based on culture of origin. Though probably well meaning, this may be ineffective or offensive. For example, despite cultural traditions, not all Japanese dislike being singled out for praise, while some Americans find individualized recognition uncomfortable. Leader errors can be very costly in terms of employee motivation.
Errors like these may become even more common as time goes on. Hybridization of culture is increasingly common, where even radically different cultures can be part of a person’s background, all contributing to a unique and “multivoiced self.”[23] To categorize a complex human being on the basis of membership in a single group limits understanding of what makes that person willing and able to give his or her full effort to their leader and organization. Given this complexity, successful leaders in diverse environments must be willing to forego the boxes, and to treat people as unique combinations of values, preferences, and needs. In this respect, leadership models such as Leader-Member Exchange Theory (LMX), which suggest that leaders concentrate on developing significant, high-quality, one-on-one relationships with staff members interested in such relationships, may present the most useful perspectives on leadership in diverse environments. Understanding each individual in all his or her complexity holds the best promise of developing meaningful and positive leader-follower relations.
Many U.S. organizations claiming interest in leading diverse groups and organizations devote the majority of their resources and energy to affirmative action programs, reflecting a narrow perspective whereby diversity concerns are limited to differences in gender and race. Success is often measured in terms of whether recruiters achieve quantitative requirements or goals. This focus is in itself a reflection of the American value on objective quantification—if we have the right numbers in each demographic category, everything is fine. Although insufficient, actively recruiting a representative workforce is a necessary first step in creating an effective yet diverse workforce. You cannot lead those who aren’t present. But numerical representation is an insufficient measure of successful diversity management, as it fails to determine whether the diversity recruited is staying around and adding value to the organization’s mission. The first and perhaps most important “best practice” is to get beyond the numbers. Once diversity has been brought into an organization, working successfully with the resulting diverse workforce requires additional thought and action.
Although the belief that effective leadership can be developed or learned is not universally shared, we do think leaders can learn skills and techniques that can help them function more effectively in diverse organizations. It is possible for people to value their own heritage without denigrating that of others. It is, however, foolhardy to think that development techniques created in one country will necessarily prove universally applicable. For example, 360-degree feedback processes are widely popular in the United States but have sometimes run into problems when used cross-culturally.[24] In the individualistic United States, leadership development tends to emphasize practical experience and the development of the individual, whereas other parts of the world might choose to emphasize theoretical aspects, power dynamics, and the development of shared collective leadership.
To meet these different training needs, there are many intercultural training and education opportunities available for leaders hoping to develop greater competency in this area, and evidence suggests that even short-term training is usually beneficial. Development goals often focus on three areas: changing people’s thinking (increasing knowledge of cultural differences and issues), affective reactions (how to manage challenges and enjoy diversity rather than merely tolerate it), and changing behaviors. Leaders must be prepared to make mistakes and learn from them. Cultures that are more tolerant of risk and comfortable with ambiguity may have an easier time in such intercultural training. But the leader’s approach to dealing with the inevitable hiccups and missteps that come with dealing with diversity can make an enormous difference. As Dalton notes, “An attitude of deep-seated courtesy and respect often buys forgiveness of behavior based on cultural misunderstanding.”[25] Skills like being insightful and open to criticism, seeking opportunities to learn, being flexible, seeking and using feedback, being sensitive to cultural differences, and being able to bring out the best in people are best-practice characteristics that bode well for any leader in diverse environments, at home or abroad.
At the organizational level, there are many strategies that have been implemented by leaders and organizations hoping to reap the benefits of diversity. Looking at a broad range of organizations that are successfully leading diverse workforces shows a wide variation in the scope and intensity of programs offered, requirements for participation, and opportunities for cross-cultural exchange. However, there are some general commonalities that offer suggestions to leaders for developing competencies in managing in diverse environments. Our “Top Ten” most prominent similarities in best practices include:
Leaders view managing diversity as a business imperative. First and foremost, successful leaders in diverse organizations see managing diversity as critical to the success of their enterprises. It is not just the right or nice thing to do, but it is something that must be done if they are to meet their organizational mission. It is fully accepted as a core leadership responsibility.
Leaders at all levels must be out front and visible as champions of diversity. Leader statements in support of diversity can send a powerful message to leaders and staff about the organization’s expectations. Leaders should use every means possible to integrate diversity into their daily business and to communicate their commitment both verbally and through their behaviors in hiring, promoting, and giving plum assignments to capable people of all different backgrounds.
Take a broad view of high-potential employees. Leaders may unduly limit the domain of acceptable job behavior to that with which they are culturally familiar and attempt to force others into that mold, experiencing predictable difficulties. The true benefit of a diverse workforce is to capitalize on the varied skills and capabilities brought by diverse staff rather than attempt to homogenize them.
Share the unwritten rules. Often leaders inaccurately assume everyone shares their expectations without the need to specify them. For example, cultures differ widely in their views of time, with Westerners tending to view time as a limited commodity and non-Westerners seeing time as more expansive. These different views may affect expectations about deadlines and the promptness of meeting start times, with some non-Westerners being more relaxed about promptness. Clearly explaining expectations on issues like these can yield far better compliance from those whose cultural expectations may differ from one’s own.
Try different approaches. As noted earlier, follower expectations of their leaders may differ significantly based on cultural differences. For example, Schmidt and Yeh identified common leader influence strategies across Australian, English, Japanese, and Taiwanese managers, but noted that both their relative importance and tactical definition differed by nationality.[26] For example, although Taiwanese and Japanese leaders combined both hard (assertiveness) and soft (reasoning) tactics, they differed in that Taiwanese endorsed greater use of sanctions while Japanese emphasized sanctions less and bureaucratic channels more than the Taiwanese. Even cultures that appear similar, like the United States and United Kingdom, can show differences. This study showed that U.K. leaders emphasized assertiveness and appealing to higher authorities more than U.S. leaders, who emphasized reasoning more. The culturally intelligent leader must be prepared and able to adapt his or her ways of interacting with diverse staff to accommodate cultural differences and to help their multicultural staffs to better adapt to the demands of their organizations.
Set high expectations for all staff. Organizational research on goal setting clearly suggests that challenging goals promote superior performance. Leaders who do not expect as much from dissimilar staff are likely to get less, perpetuating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Goals should be set at the upper end of the follower’s capability; this will provide challenge while ensuring that the individual can actually do what is required.
Provide training as an ongoing education process. Many organizations have found incorporating diversity into ongoing leadership development activities to be more successful than stand-alone programs in conveying the message that attending to diversity is an integral part of day-to-day leadership. This does not mean that diversity-focused programs cannot be useful, but rather that their value is enhanced by being part of a larger effort to promote inclusiveness throughout the organization.
Consider “best practices” from other organizations, but tailor to your own organization’s needs. Every organization is unique in terms of demands, resources, and staff demographics; strategies for managing diversity will need to consider the particular organization’s history, needs, and employees. Know your own organization and choose best practices that will best address local needs.
Be inclusive. Diversity includes everyone in the mix, and no one should be excluded or blamed for past societal discrimination. AT&T found this out the hard way by putting about 100,000 employees through diversity programs that left some of their White male employees feeling left out and attacked.[27] Xerox had a similar experience with White men feeling excluded, and learned that successful initiatives make it clear that diversity includes White men along with everyone else.[28] These and other negative experiences with diversity programs underscore the need to carefully evaluate programs and remove any that increase intergroup tensions in favor of those that increase openness and curiosity.
Learn from your diverse staff. Successful leadership requires taking the time to actively listen and to carefully watch for potential cultural factors that may be interfering with a staff member’s ability to function successfully. Listening to employees was a key theme for success articulated a by recent meeting of four hundred executives dealing with workplace diversity issues.[29] Leaders should structure time for discussions with staff, both individually and collectively, to discern any problems or concerns they may have.
Incorporating these best practices involves a commitment to significant cultural change by embracing and using diversity as an organizational strength. One of the practical difficulties with implementing the more individualized leadership styles that we have suggested are concerns regarding potential fairness issues. Although fairness is one of the more universal ethical premises, it may mean different things in different places. Responsibility for maintaining fairness typically falls to leaders, challenging their wisdom in balancing issues of fairness and equality. Some leaders interpret fairness as exactly equal treatment, without consideration of individual needs or capabilities. In this manner of thinking, then, everyone in a given position should have the same training, the same conditions, and the same opportunities. Clearly, such “equality” will hamper the ability of leaders to give each staff member what she or he needs to thrive and will doom those requiring different treatment to failure. If you applied this logic to your home garden, you would quickly find that many of your hoped-for flowers would die, as some need more sun, some more shade, some more acidic soil, some more alkaline. Success comes from matching treatment with optimal conditions for growth, without viewing different needs as inherent inadequacies.
Yet leaders often resist giving certain staff members “special treatment.” For example, Grimsley reports a situation in which Moslem staff asked their manager for permission to work through lunch and leave earlier during the daytime-fasting month of Ramadan rather than take a “lunch” break when they could not eat.[30] Interestingly, it was the manager’s peers—not other staff—who objected to her accommodating the wishes of these staff members, apparently fearing that a precedent of accommodation would be set that might later be difficult to break. Thus, individualizing may require not only discerning appropriate adaptations but also the courage to defend one’s judgments to peers and management. For example, managers at Celanese Chemical had to forcefully push against their own senior management to delay the opening of a new $125 million plant in Singapore for more than a month in order to open on the next “lucky day,” as prescribed by local tradition.[31] Yet to do otherwise might have proven far more expensive in the long run, with locals potentially reluctant to work at an “unlucky” plant or purchase its products.
People do not need to think, feel, or act in similar ways in order to reach agreement on practical issues and work together cooperatively. Leaders have always played key roles in developing and communicating shared norms and practices, and diversity may make these roles ever more important. Leaders can help their organizations forge a broader and more inclusive perspective on “how we do things around here” that represents a combination of different approaches that diverse people can endorse as their own even if it differs in significant respects from some of their culturally formed values. To the extent that different perspectives are integrated into organizational practices, leaders can expect greater acceptance of them as opposed to a more autocratic approach that emphasizes the traditions of a single national culture, gender, or race, and places that tradition in opposition to the others represented in the organization. This suggests that leaders adopt a more synergistic approach, one that allows for a combination of styles or methods without a presumption of inherent superiority of any single way.[32] By listening to staff and incorporating their traditions, leaders can help move organizations away from a parochial “Our way is the only way” position or an ethnocentric “Our way is the best way” approach to a position that represents the best combination of options for maximum effectiveness.
There are many ways leaders and organizations can implement the best practices described previously. Each method has its own advantages and challenges; describing each one or even several in a useful amount of detail would be the province of a book unto itself. Here, we outline two approaches that we believe effectively address most of our best practice suggestions. First is a broad organizational approach to incorporating diversity into all aspects of the business, and is exemplified by the efforts of Marriott International. Marriott has been highly cited as a leader in successfully responding to diversity issues, and their experience, detailed below, can be instructive to other organizations. Second, we outline an approach that can help leaders learn about their organization’s specific diversity issues and possible solutions, and that can be initiated by individual leaders themselves as well as more broadly by organizations: mentoring.
With more than 133,000 employees worldwide, comprising a wide range of backgrounds and nationalities, Marriott is succeeding by consciously embracing the diversity of its workforce. Recent accolades for their efforts in leading a diverse staff include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Minorities in Hospitality in 2005, being named by DiversityInc magazine as one the “Top 50 Companies for Diversity,” and “Best Company” ratings by Hispanic Business, Black Enterprise, Latina Style, and Working Mother magazines. Their efforts at leading a diverse workforce certainly contributed to their overall ranking by Fortune magazine as one of the most admired companies in America.
Table 13.1 briefly summarizes some of Marriott’s successful leadership initiatives, focusing on those that help managers to work with a diverse workforce. As can be seen, these initiatives form a comprehensive package that stresses the value of diversity throughout the organization, from strong efforts to recruit diverse individuals, to training staff, and developing leadership that appreciates differences and the benefits that those differences can provide. Marriott initiatives even encompass supporting diversity in how they choose their suppliers and how they appeal to various clienteles.
Table 13.1. Marriott’s Diversity Programs.
Finding Diverse Leaders and Followers |
Recruitment Programs |
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Developing Leaders to Manage Diversity |
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Managing a Diverse Business |
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Unlike many less successful organizations, a key feature of Marriott’s approach is that diversity issues are not addressed solely by a stand-alone program that implies separation of diversity issues from the basic aspects of the business. Thus, diversity is not just an issue of bringing in demographically different staff, but in finding ways to integrate and use that diversity throughout their organization. The value of diversity is integrated throughout the organization as a key aspect of meeting their organizational mission, fostering the kind of common purpose that should help people transcend their demographic identities and work together cooperatively to serve Marriott’s clients. Marriott views their success as not due solely to any particular program or set of programs. Rather, it is through the combination of initiatives and leadership actions that the broad message goes out to every corner of the organization that diversity matters to the success of their enterprise.
Although these programs work well for Marriott, no program or set of programs can guarantee success in all places, and what works for Marriott may not work elsewhere. Each organization needs to tailor its approach to diversity to fit its own staff, based on the organization’s history, staffing patterns, and business strategy. However, in any organization, success in leading a diverse staff comes as much through leadership commitment and careful implementation as through particular programs or initiatives. In that regard, the words of Marriott chairman and chief executive officer J. W. Marriott, Jr., are instructive: “Our commitment to diversity is absolute. It is the only way for us to attract and retain the very best talent available. It is the only way to forge the business relationships necessary to continue our dynamic growth. And it is the only way to meet our responsibilities to our associates, customers, partners and stakeholders.”[33]
Another way to implement many of our best practice suggestions is through focusing on developing diverse staff through mentoring. Mentors are traditionally defined as individuals possessing advanced knowledge and experience who make an active effort to support the development and upward mobility of a more junior individual’s (protégé’s) career. Mentoring may be formal or informal; instituted by the organization or naturally evolving from a preexisting relationship between mentor and protégé. Thanks to advanced communication technologies, mentors and protégés no longer need to work in the same organizations, hierarchies, or even locations, though long distance mentoring has some limitations. Both formal and informal individual mentoring relationships can be expanded into mentoring networks, collections of individual mentors that offer advice and support to the same protégé(s). Even the definition of mentor has expanded to recognize the advantages of receiving mentoring from a variety of organizational members, not just higher-ranking leaders. Peers or junior staff members with new information to share can serve as valuable mentors to leaders as well as leaders serving as mentors to more junior staff.
Compared to other interventions, mentoring offers a unique combination of advantages that make it a particularly good diversity leadership technique. Its flexibility makes it highly responsive to diversity and allows for the development of programs tailored to specific organizational needs. Mentoring can be sustained for as long as the participants feel necessary to provide an ongoing source of ideas and skills development, or it may start and stop as the situation demands.
Face-to-face conversations offer many options for learning from diverse staff, and provide a better environment for discussing sensitive issues and an organization’s unwritten rules than an all-staff meeting. Such conversations also help leaders to better gauge their protégés’ capabilities, allowing leaders to develop insight into how high-potential employees can come in a variety of guises and set appropriately high standards that inspire better performance. Leaders can try different approaches with each protégé to find the methods that work best for each one. Because mentoring and mentoring networks can be opened to all employees, majority and minority, they can provide a high level of inclusiveness and avoid excluding any group.
In addition, mentoring can help produce more tangible outcomes for employees and organizations. Several studies have shown that those who are mentored enjoy higher salaries along with increased promotion rates and career mobility. Mentoring has also been found to have a positive impact on career and job satisfaction while decreasing the turnover intentions of protégés.[34] Some companies have used mentoring relationships to provide updated skills training to senior employees through “reverse mentoring” relationships. Employees with more recent and advanced training in technology or industry techniques, such as recent graduates, have provided valuable computer skills training to senior executives who may not feel comfortable or have the time to attend generalized classes.
Another valuable aspect is the opportunity to use mentoring as a clear signal of a leader’s commitment to diversity. Leaders in most organizations do not have the time or emotional resources to have a personal relationship with every individual organizational member. By focusing their own mentoring efforts on those who are or will be in a position to mentor others, leaders can set the tone for inclusiveness throughout the company, creating networks of diversity champions throughout the organization. Mentoring diverse protégés can serve as an example to organizational minorities that their demographic characteristics are not an obstacle to advancing in the organization even if they are not personally mentored. Mentored managers will have a better sense of their leaders’ support of diversity and be better empowered to apply the same perspectives in their own decision making.
When leaders are aware of the effects of diversity in organizations and follow conscious and open-minded approaches, mentoring can be a strong force for developing diverse staff as well as developing leaders themselves. In diverse contexts, culturally intelligent leadership requires the ability to discern problems and openly seek new solutions in sometimes creative ways, and mentoring can help open channels of communication between leaders and diverse followers. Although mentoring is only one option that leaders can use to develop their diverse staff members, it is a very visible way to demonstrate commitment to a diverse workplace at all levels and to lead by example.
Leaders need to remember that most traditional leadership theories were developed and tested on White males from the United States or other Anglo-Saxon cultures, cultures that are characterized by low power distance, low uncertainty avoidance, fairly high masculinity, and very high individualism. The generalizability of these leadership approaches to other races, genders, and cultures must be determined, with the hope of developing a more globally relevant understanding of leadership behavior. Scholars of leadership have not devoted sufficient time to carefully rethinking our traditional theories and models to accommodate this far more diverse followership. As organizations become more global, it is critical that leadership theory and practice be increasingly reexamined through the lens of culture. Leaders in our global society will increasingly need to extend their skills in developing positive leader-follower relationships with diverse followers.
In this chapter, we have emphasized the need for leaders to embrace the creation of an inclusive work climate that supports diverse staff as a vital requirement for effective leadership. We have presented a number of strategies found to be effective in successfully diverse organizations, and we encourage leaders to consider how they might fit into their own organizations. We have also suggested mentoring as a process that combines many of the best practice strategies, a key way that leaders can help their diverse followers succeed, both by mentoring diverse staff themselves and by seeing that diverse staff members have access to a variety of other mentors as well.
There are many lessons to be learned from the experiences of successful organizations. The most basic lesson is that success is certainly possible: many multinational and international organizations have thrived despite significant value differences among their diverse employees. They have done it not by denying differences in values or perspectives, or by forcing diverse staff into a single corporate mold, but rather by coalescing around shared organizational expectations and practices and making those expectations and practices known and understood by all. Bringing in diverse staff is the easier part of embracing diversity in organizations: the more difficult part for today’s leaders is changing the tacit assumptions and everyday behaviors that often unintentionally limit the contributions and prospects of a diverse workforce.