Research in Organizational Change and Development

Abraham B. (Rami) Shani, Debra A. Noumair, Abraham B. (Rami) Shani, Debra A. Noumair

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781802621747
• eBook ISBN: 9781802621754
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Operations
• Index: Business

Volume 29 of Research in Organizational Change and Development includes ten contributions from colleagues around the globe with powerful insights and potentially relevant impact for researching and practicing organization change and development during and post the pandemic. 

The emerging people analytics subfield and organization development perspectives are brought together to present an integrated framework that can guide future theoretical development and practice. Bourdieu's concept of social position in the form of "habitus oriented approach" expands our understanding of human behavior. Lewin's original view of political labs is advanced to examine the emerging phenomenon of labs as mechanisms for organization change and development. The alignment challenges of strategy and digital technology in government organizations is examined via the use of collaborative inquiry. The essence and context of collaboration in teams is investigated in the emerging new workplace. The current state of organizational DEI practice is examined and a new framework for diagnosing and addressing small-scale diversity-related challenges is introduced. Digital transformation suggests the need for a new STS platform with new guiding design principles. The establishment of a collaborative community generated insights into the challenges faced by healthcare organizations. Action research supported new cooperation and partnership between universities and external organizations. In the new "Reflection" feature, the author compares organization development (OD) and change management (CM) across eight concepts that are relevant to both OD and CM. 

Context-Levels-Culture: A Diagnostic Framework for Consulting to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Change in Organizations

Frank D. Golom and Mateo Cruz

Abstract

Scholarship on workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is voluminous. Nevertheless, there is relatively little work that examines DEI from an organization development and change (ODC) or systems perspective. As a result, there is no unified framework ODC practitioners can use for DEI diagnosis and intervention. The purpose of this chapter is to review the ODC literature with respect to DEI and propose a diagnostic Context-Levels-Culture (CLC) framework for understanding and addressing diversity-related challenges in organizations. We also present a case example of how this framework can be used in DEI consulting, including implications for future research and practice.

Keywords: Diversity; equity; inclusion; organization development; organization change; systems thinking; organizational diagnosis; consulting

After decades of theory and research in the social, organizational, and management literatures (Roberson, Ryan, & Raggins, 2017) and billions of dollars spent annually on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives (Mehta, 2019), what began as a niche area of inquiry (Anand & Winters, 2008) is now a workplace imperative. The fact that the global and local US workforce will continue to diversify is a fundamental assumption of workplace DEI scholarship and practice (Roberson, 2019). The growing number of women and people of color in the US labor market (Toossi, 2015) combined with changing attitudes related to generational values, religious tolerance, sexual orientation, and gender identification (Hout, 2020) now mean that more and more individuals will find themselves working with others whose backgrounds and worldviews are different from their own. As a result, there is a need, both in science and practice, to examine the consequences of diversity and consider its implications for individuals and organizational systems.

In this regard, there is no shortage of DEI research. Several prominent reviews of workforce diversity have been conducted in the last decade (e.g., Guillaume, Dawson, Woods, Sacramento, & West, 2013; Holmes et al., 2021; Joshi, Liao, & Roh, 2011; Triana, Gu, Chapa, Richard, & Collela, 2021), providing a robust set of meta-analytic and integrative findings around which our current understanding now hinges. Organizational scholars and practitioners know a fair amount about racial and gender dynamics in the US workplace, including the impact of an employee's race and gender on a number of important human resource judgments and decisions (Triana et al., 2021). Literatures on age, disability, religion, and sexual orientation are smaller by comparison, but growing (Triana et al., 2021).

There is also a steadily increasing base of knowledge regarding diversity-related interventions in organizations (Ferdman, 2021). This includes, but is not limited to, research on how to improve climates for diversity (Cachat-Rosset, Carillo, & Klarsfeld, 2019; Groggins & Ryan, 2013; Komaki & Minnich, 2016) and inclusion (Nishii & Rich, 2014) as well as how to develop inclusive leaders (Perry, Block, & Noumair, 2020; Roberson & Perry, 2021; Shore & Chung, 2021). Diversity training also continues to receive attention (Chang et al., 2019; Cheng et al., 2019; Lindsey, King, Amber, Sabat, & Ahmad, 2019; Ragins & Ehrhardt, 2021; Rawski & Conroy, 2020), despite inconclusive evidence regarding its overall effectiveness (Devine & Ash, 2022; Kalinoski et al., 2013). And, microaggressions, the “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory or negative slights and insults to the target person or group” (Sue et al., 2007, p. 273), continue to gain traction in DEI theory and practice (Kim, Block, & Nguyen, 2019).

For organization development and change (ODC) scholars and practitioners who engage in DEI work, there is no shortage of scholarship that can be used to inform client interactions. There is, however, a shortage of work, both in research and in practice, that approaches DEI from a systems perspective (Block & Noumair, 2017; Golom, 2018). In their call for papers for a special issue of The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science devoted to understanding diversity dynamics, Block and Noumair (2015) remark that although there has been a “great deal of research on understanding the causes of this persistent social inequality in organizational settings,” there is far less attention to “the role of the organizational context or system where these persistent inequalities occur” (p. 5–6). In fact, relative to decades of research on workplace diversity and discrimination (Triana et al., 2021), there is little research that addresses DEI as an organization development, change, or systems issue (Ferdman, 2014; Golom, 2018; Gonzalez, 2010). Existing work offers insights into the influence of social identity variables on human resource judgments (e.g., Perry et al., 2017), the attitudes, behaviors and cognitive processes of members of minority and majority groups (e.g., Deitch et al., 2003), the impact of interventions targeting individual biases or empowering members of underrepresented groups (e.g., Wilton, Good, Moss-Racusin, & Sanchez, 2015), and the impact of group or organizational-level diversity on organizational processes and outcomes (e.g., Richard, Kirby, & Chadwick, 2013). Yet far less is known about (1) how to understand DEI issues as systemic challenges embedded in an organization's culture, (2) how to diagnose such challenges using a systemic, organization change frame, (3) how such a diagnosis might lead to different and more effective interventions than those suggested by current DEI research and practice, and (4) how such interventions might ultimately create sustainable, whole system change.

The purpose of this chapter is to address the first two of these gaps and answer the question of how to frame DEI issues from a systems perspective and how to approach diagnosing those issues using a systemic, organization change frame. In the first part of the chapter, we provide a limited overview of current approaches to managing DEI in organizations, which research continually demonstrates lead to mixed results and which often fail to frame workplace diversity as an organizational change issue. We then review the relatively few studies that explore DEI work from an ODC and systems perspective in effort to inform a more holistic and diagnostic approach. Based on this review, we suggest that the lack of a systems, organizational change frame is one possible explanation for the insufficient evidence associated with the long-term success of many popular individual-level DEI interventions (e.g., diversity training).

In the second part of the chapter, we propose a conceptual framework to understand and diagnose issues of workplace diversity from a systems, organization change perspective. Building on previous work by Gonzalez (2010) and Golom (2018), we argue that ODC practitioners must account for the influence of (1) context, (2) multiple levels of analysis, and (3) organizational culture in their diagnostic work with clients, which we label the Context-Levels-Culture (CLC) framework. In the final section of the paper, we provide a short case example to illustrate the application of the CLC framework to a professional services firm struggling with diversity and inclusion. Throughout the chapter, we rely on a fundamental premise of the ODC literature frequently championed by thought leaders in the field (Burke, 2017; Burke & Noumair, 2015) and echoed by a growing number of DEI scholars and practitioners (Block & Noumair, 2015, 2017; DiTomaso, 2010; Gonzalez, 2010; Stephens, Rivera, & Townsend, 2020) – individual-level interventions do not bring about systems-level change. Because DEI issues are fundamentally about the deep structure of an organization (Gersick, 1991), they are, first and foremost, systems-level issues and need to be diagnosed as such, particularly if we hope to achieve successful and sustainable organizational transformation.

Last, although we acknowledge the intimate link between diagnosis and intervention in ODC consulting practice (Burke & Noumair, 2015), this chapter intentionally focuses on the diagnostic phase of the consulting cycle and not on intervention. Given the limited research exploring DEI as a systemic culture change issue, we believe it is important to address the notable lack of theorizing on how DEI challenges can be understood and approached from a systems perspective. We are also not aware of published work that presents a diagnostic frame that can be used to consult to DEI issues. To that end, Ferdman (2020), in a recent special issue of Consulting Psychology Journal on the state of diversity and inclusion initiatives, writes:

Although I would have liked to see additional contributions more systematically addressing how consulting psychologists, in particular, approach D&I initiatives, their absence may in itself indicate that this work has not yet become a core element of what many consulting psychologists do or are prepared to do. (p. 245)

By focusing on diagnosis, this chapter and the framework we propose directly answer Ferdman's call. We hope that the chapter can serve as a guide for consulting psychologists and ODC scholars and practitioners as they begin DEI work with their clients.

DEI and Organizational Change

The existing empirical literature on organizational DEI challenges is voluminous, spans the mainstream management, psychology, and organizational behavior fields, and covers the last six decades (Roberson, 2019; Triana et al., 2021). Although there has been limited attention in this literature to examining the effectiveness of diversity management interventions (Roberson, Ryan, & Ragins, 2017), several scholars have noted the mixed and sometimes negative outcomes (Dobbin & Kalev, 2016, 2018; Kalev, Dobbin, & Kelly, 2006; Leslie, 2019; Stephens et al., 2020; Yadav & Lenka, 2020) associated with common individual-level diversity initiatives, including frequently employed diversity and unconscious bias training (Dobbin & Kalev, 2018) as well as organizational grievance policies and standardized performance evaluations or hiring tests (Dobbin & Kalev, 2016). Additionally, the mainstream literature does not often frame diversity as an issue that requires a fundamental change in the organizational culture or system (Block & Noumair, 2015, 2017; Gonzalez, 2010), which may in fact account for the lack of progress on key DEI issues over the last several decades.

Before developing our systems framework further, we therefore consulted the few studies that do explore DEI from an ODC perspective. We conducted a systematic literature search of papers published in science-to-practice journals as designated by the 2018 Academic Journal Guide (AJG). The 2018 AJG is a guide used to evaluate the quality of journals in business and management based on expert review across 22 subject areas (Chartered Association of Business Schools, 2018, March). For the purpose of this paper, we identified 25 science-to-practice journals across two AJG categories: organizational studies (ORG STUD) and workplace psychology (PSYCH-WOP-OB). Additionally, we included five journals either not ranked or listed in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Editor
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Contributors
• Preface
• Are OD and Analytics Twins Separated at Birth? Toward an Integrated Framework
• The Laboratization of Change: What Is It with Labs and Change These Days?
• Toward Reconfiguring Sociotechnical Systems Design: Digitally Infused Work Systems and the “Platform-STS”
• From Psychological Dispositions to Social Positions: Applying a Habitus-oriented Approach to Organization Development and Change
• Using Action Research and Organization Design to Plan In-home Hospital Treatment
• Opening the Doors of the Ivory Tower: Action Research as a Tool Supporting Cooperation between Universities and External Organizations
• Designing for Collaboration: Don't Just Focus on the Team, Focus Also on the Context in Which Teams Work
• Context-Levels-Culture: A Diagnostic Framework for Consulting to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Change in Organizations
• Aligning Strategy and Digital Technology in Government Organizations: A Call to Action
• Reflections: Change Management Is Not Organization Development