Making sense of diversity in the workplace: Organizational justice and language abstraction in employees' accounts of diversity-related incidents

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Roberson, QM; Stevens, CK
• 署名单位: Cornell University; University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0021-9010
• DOI: 10.1037/0021-9010.91.2.379
• 发表日期: 2006
• 页码: 379-391
• 关键词: diversity; JUSTICE; language; abstraction; sense-making

摘要

To discern patterns of employee sense-making about workplace diversity, the authors analyzed 751 natural language accounts of diversity incidents from 712 workers in one department of a large organization. Six generic incident types emerged: discrimination, representation, treatment by management, work relationships, respect between groups, and diversity climates. Consistent with hypotheses, incidents that respondents viewed as negative, accounts from women, and those involving members of respondents' in-groups were more likely to cite justice issues. Partially consistent with research on the linguistic intergroup bias, both negative and positive accounts involving out-group members and accounts from men were more likely to be expressed using abstract verb forms. The authors discuss future opportunities to integrate research on diversity, justice, and the linguistic category model.