The Routledge Companion to Inclusive Leadership

Joan Marques

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000039658
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

An important reference work on a practice that is needed more than ever in a VUCA world, this book helps readers understand the importance of responsible and constructive practices and behavior in leadership.

The broad approach to inclusive leadership presented in this volume highlights correlations between inclusive leadership and myriad issues, qualities, and circumstances that serve as foundations or impact factors on it. Some contributors review contemporary concepts and challenges such as change, innovation, the bottom line, sustainability, and performance excellence against inclusive leadership. Other contributors reflect on critical practices and qualities, such as trust, passion, ethics, spirituality, and empathy, and their relationships with inclusive leadership. A range of religious and spiritual influences are also evaluated in the context of inclusive leadership, such as (but not limited to) Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Christianity.

Postgraduate students, instructors, and coaches will appreciate this comprehensive look at inclusive leadership, which has become an urgent concept to be internalized and practiced by all, regardless of positions, possessions, locations, or generations.

Part I

Stakeholder Considerations

1
Inclusive Leadership, Diversity, and Wakefulness

Joan Marques

Introduction

This chapter will review three phenomena that are of critical importance in workplace performance: inclusive leadership, diversity, and wakefulness. The foundational purpose of bringing these three phenomena together is to reveal their interdependency and help readers understand why they should be applied in congruence. In the first section, the trend of leadership will be discussed with special emphasis on inclusive leadership. In the second section, an elaboration of diversity is presented, with emphasis on workplace tendencies. This section will particularly highlight several wrong implementations of diversity that lead to less favorable outcomes. The section will subsequently explain the right reason for implementing diversity and link this to inclusive leadership. In the third section, wakefulness will be evaluated, with a special emphasis on its role in inclusive leadership. Two roadmaps for wakeful performance will thereby be shared: AWAKENED, an acronym that brings together the behaviors of authenticity, wakefulness, agility, kindness, evenness (equilibrium), neuroticism, eagerness, and deliberation, and the Noble Eightfold Path, an interrelated system of eight continuous efforts, which are right understanding, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. The chapter will conclude by bringing the three phenomena together through a visual impression.

Inclusive Leadership

The practice of inclusive leadership is not a luxury, and in fact not even an option anymore: it is a requirement for any leader who wants to succeed in taking his or her organization to greater heights than before. There is enormous competition in our world, and excelling has never been more challenging than it is today. After all, we can easily learn about the strategies, directions, performances, and leadership of practically any organization on their corporate websites and in their widely available annual reports. The world has become a transparent place, and in many regards, this is a great thing, even though it has its downsides.

One of the main upsides of today’s global organizational transparency is the fact that learning from best practices—benchmarking—has never been easier. This means that some common mistakes from the past no longer have to be made if leaders keep their eyes wide open. In organizational performance, transparency is touted as a sign of ethical responsibility and inclusion. Parris, Dapko, Arnold, and Arnold (2016) perceive transparency in organizations as a sign of openness and ethical awareness that reduces skepticism, increases trust and confidence, empowers internal and external stakeholders, and therefore nurtures healthy relationships.

On the downside, transparency places a severe time constraint on the uniqueness of anyone’s special services or products compared to pre-internet days, because competitors can quickly find out what is happening in the market. In a study on transparency in China’s public healthcare, Yang (2018) acknowledges the earlier mentioned advantages of transparency, but also warns that it can provide stakeholders with a sense of involvement to an extent that their expectations exceed the service or quality received, thus leading to dissatisfaction. Bianchi (2015) adds that there is also room for caution in the fact that the trust relationship created by being transparent can lead to abuse and exploitation of privileges and power. Haesevoets et al. (2019) further caution us in regards to the perceived transparency in workplace communication, where excessive copying of supervisors in email correspondence may be seen as a sign of increased control and consequently invoke a sense of mistrust and unethical behavior rather than trust and ethical performance.

When it comes to leading people, history has taught us that there is a wide range of styles that can be implemented, from highly people-oriented to highly process-oriented and from highly interactive to highly authoritative. While leadership styles can be learned and adopted, individual leaders also have character-based elements that make the application of certain leadership behaviors easier or harder. In recent years, several soft-skill focused leadership styles have gained popularity: awakened, prosocial, servant, authentic, transformational, and situational are just a handful of those. Each of the just mentioned leadership styles carries the common factor of inclusion: leadership is not practiced as a one-way street but as an interactive process, in which all stakeholders have decent input in expressing opinions, proposing ideas, and taking ownership.

Inclusive leadership specifically refers to leaders who are open, accessible, and available when it comes to interacting with their workforce (Nembhard & Edmondson, 2006). The process of including colleagues contributes to an uplifted atmosphere in the workplace (Hollander, 2009). Taking these behavioral patterns into consideration, Ye, Wang, and Li (2018) aver that the general mood created through inclusive leadership leads to better relationships between employees and their leaders, resulting in greater inspiration among employees to learn from their errors and seek continuous improvement. Javed, Mehdi, Abdul, Arjoon, and Hafiz (2019) include the aspect of innovation as a clear outcome of implementing inclusive leadership. They affirm that “inclusive leadership is positively related with innovative work behavior, and psychological safety mediates the effect of inclusive leadership on innovative work behavior” (p. 117). Javed et al. explain this trend as a result of inclusive leaders making important information available to employees and including them in discussions and decision processes, thus granting them a sense of ownership and co-responsibility.

It should be noted that highly interactive leadership styles may not work as well in primarily mechanized workplaces as in organic ones, where production processes are not repetitive, preparedness of employees is higher, and turnover is lower. Because employees usually don’t have an intention to stay too long in several mechanistic work environments, it is not easy or ideal for a leader to make collaborative decisions, simply because there might be little input from these employees, due to little interest in the organization’s strategic growth. Of course, there may be highly mechanized work environments where employees don’t intend to leave any time soon and see their job as something of a steadier nature, so every situation has to be carefully assessed before deciding on the appropriate leadership style.

Inclusion could also be interpreted in multiple ways. Some leaders may decide to implement inclusive leadership by way of making all decisions as a team, while others may be selective in which types of decisions should be made in which team echelon. Yet others may place the inclusive emphasis on a different area, such as providing stakeholders a voice in regards to flexible work hours or job sharing. It is important, however, for leaders to understand that what they consider inclusive may not be perceived as such by others. Especially in diverse work environments, there is a major chance that some groups may feel left out due to a subconsciously displayed bias from the leader. Inclusive leadership systematically tries to avoid such pitfalls. It could be defined as a relational construct that emerges from a process of mutual influence and collective adaptation to fluid environments. Beyond care and compassion, it cultivates deeper and authentic relationships, modeling courage and embracing humane ideals as components of inclusive organizations (Gallegos, 2014). Inclusive leader behaviors involve accountability for creating an inclusive culture, engagement and dialogue, bringing one’s true self to work, fostering transparent decision-making, understanding and engaging with resistance, and communicating how inclusion relates to mission and vision (Ferdman, 2014, p. 42).

Inclusive leaders encourage followers to nurture their individual strengths. They make sure there are resources for employee development, and they support their followers in pursuing opportunities for growth and collective progress (Gotsis & Grimani, 2016).

Diversity

Diversity is another topic that has demanded increased attention and awareness in recent decades. Diversity in organizational contexts refers to situations that germinate when employees differ in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, education, etc. (Panicker, Agrawal, & Utkal, 2018). As workplaces become more diverse in regards to generations, ethnicities, genders, and a number of preferences, it has become evident that leaders can no longer apply one-size-fits-all approaches in treating, rewarding, and advocating for employees.

Diversity should be implemented with caution and for the right reasons. There are many organizational leaders who only engage in an effort toward a more diverse workplace when they realize that they are losing customers by remaining too homogeneous. Such reactive diversity is oftentimes detected rather quickly by customers and may lead to alienation anyway.

Just like inclusive leadership, diversity can be interpreted and implemented in numerous ways. The unfortunate reality is, however, that these ways of implementing diversity are oftentimes mere means toward an end (which is mostly profit-focused), and not an end unto themselves.

Some organizations claim to be diverse when the overall picture of their workforce reveals the presence of multiple ethnicities, abilities, and ages. And while this is true in the plain sense of the word, these organizations fail to consider the positioning of many of their members. An in-depth examination of such organizations reveals that the higher echelons are rather uniform, and that diversity only trickles in at the lower levels, where there is no decision power and no solicitation of opinions toward decision-making processes. By implementing this strategy, these organizations keep the controlling mechanisms in the hands of a homogeneous group that is unable to make decisions with the depth that a diverse team would display (Marques, 2008).

Some organizations limit their diversity to location: they tailor their workforce to their local customer base, which usually entails that only the service level of their workforce is diverse, preferably based on designated environmental segments. When operating on a global scale, these organizations apply diversity to accommodate customers in the countries where they operate, but refrain from enabling their employees from various geographic areas to learn from one another. They do not shift workers throughout the organization, so the knowledge of properly accommodating certain groups of customers remains confined within local borders. The outcome of the story is that the deeper advantages of diversity—mutual learning, mindset expansion, greater acceptance, and enhanced insights—remain uncultivated.

Then there are organizations that support diversity in appearance of their workforce overall but insist on uniform, set, and dated perspectives and procedures, thus silencing parts of their workforce, who may know of great alternative options for implementing processes more effectively, based on their difference in background and insights. Some organizations reach out to their customers in their diversity strategy, but do not necessarily believe in diversity as the morally proper thing to do. Their main concern is that customers feel at ease in the store by recognizing salespeople on the floor who come from the same background or racial group as theirs.

Engaging in the right reasons for diversity would entail granting all members of the diverse workforce the same opportunities to advance. Variety in race, gender, education, age, or cultural background will then result in greater insights and creativity at all levels. Engaging in the right reasons would also entail that globally operating organizations ensure optimal internal, integrated, and external learning for all employees. Employee exchange programs should be created and interorganizational travel across geographically dispersed locations should be highly encouraged, so that multi-applicability and rich learning can occur (Marques, 2008). Engaging in the right reasons would thus entail applying diversity in the first place because it is morally correct. The world consists of human beings that are equal to one another, even if they differ in color, shape, size, age, ability, preferences, or gender. If this mindset can become part of the nature of the organization, performance as a whole will be augmented and profits will consequently increase.

Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages to diversity. The most common advantage is that a diverse workforce can be a source of wealth in implementing inventive ways of doing things. Originality can become the winning proposition for such an organization if optimally utilized. Besides, with a world as diverse as ours, diversity in the workplace is just the most natural thing to maintain. The reason, then, why so many organizations still have a problem with implementing diversity is that it requires...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Editor
• Notes on Contributors
• Part I Stakeholder Considerations
• Part II Inclusive Intersections
• Part III Inclusive Leadership Practices
• Index