Navigating the Moral-Economic Paradox of Diversity Management: Plurality of Stakeholder Perceptions and Coping Strategies
研究通过访谈一家成功实施多元化举措的组织中的关键利益相关者，发现不同群体对多元化管理中的张力感知和应对策略存在嵌套式差异，为管理者理解多元化举措的复杂效果提供参考。
Managing diversity is a challenge for many organizations and their diversity initiatives are often criticized for an inability to produce tangible outcomes. One reason for such mixed results is the fact that espoused diversity policies are often implemented in multi-objective contexts in which various stakeholders perceive of diversity and its place in the organization in different ways, thus affecting organizational outcomes. To shed new light on these challenges, we apply paradox theory to diversity management. Based on a series of interviews with all key stakeholder groups of one organization that successfully implemented a diversity initiative in a challenging context, we are able to provide a systematic account of differences between stakeholder groups in terms of both the tensions they perceive in diversity management and the solutions they prefer. Our data show that stakeholders perceive of tensions in a nested fashion, where some only see one or two categories of tensions, whereas others perceive a much wider range. This nested fashion re-appears in the coping strategies which different stakeholders prefer. Here, we found that ‘observers’ and ‘makers’ – that is, the two groups who are, respectively, least and most involved with the policy – favour strategies that accept the paradoxical tensions, whereas ‘beneficiaries’ tend to emphasize strategies to resolve them. We conclude our paper by discussing managerial implications of our findings, as well as avenues for future research.