The level of intergroup
Inquiring at the level of intergroup is to delve into the assumption that intergroup relations profoundly colour an individual’s perceptions of the world, and thus lead to playing a critical role in how the individual treats others and is treated by others.
Inquiring at the intergroup level.
Inquiring at the level of intergroup helps to make sense of organisational events in terms of the current or historical relationship between groups or their representatives. The group memberships that individuals carry with them into a group, reveal an understanding of the source of their behaviour. The basis for intergroup relations can develop from hierarchical and task position, sex, race, age, ethnic identities and ideological differences. Thus when a person speaks or acts, they represent or are treated as if they are representing a sub-group to which they are felt and/or perceived to belong.
The obstacles to working with the level of intergroup.
Generating intergroup hypotheses requires more information than is often available upon first observation. Whereas it is relatively easy to attribute personality characteristics to an individual or some problematic relationship to a pair of individuals, group memberships are not always visible. And inquiring into them is also not easy because of the difficulty of determining what kind of information will be useful in establishing group membership in the first place. Finally, the problem of considering intergroup explanations is difficult because the reality is that most of us actively avoid such explanations. And we do so because speaking of the possible influence of group memberships in a team meeting is likely to be perceived as prejudiced or worse. Another facet to not being able to speak about this is the fear of being thought of as or outright called a bigot for noticing group memberships. Both of these suppress the conversation about their possible impact on one or more member’s behaviors.
Improving the situation at this level.
Courses of action that follow from diagnosing at the level of intergroup always include convening the groups involved, or representatives of these groups, to inquire about their experiences in the organisation. While this is a daunting task to even consider because collecting more data might reveal its pervasiveness throughout the organisation, we can begin to pursue sophisticated diagnoses to deepen our understanding. The inquiry itself may also reveal or suggest ways of addressing it. Following this diagnosis, taking action often involves sustained conversation both within and between the groups. Because intergroup relations often have long histories and complicated current realities, changes do happen slowly and require patience and persistence.
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Trouble with race relations
Iversen Dunham was an international consulting firm focused on foreign and domestic economic-development policy. The firm’s managers sought help to understand what was leading to race relations becoming a divisive issue precisely at a time when the firm was receiving accolades for its diversity efforts. In fact, other organizations had even begun to use the firm to benchmark their own diversity programs.
Iversen’s diversity efforts had begun in the early 1970s, when senior managers decided to consciously pursue greater racial and gender diversity in the firm’s higher ranks. (The firm’s leaders had been strongly committed to the cause of social justice.) Women and people of color were hired and charted on career paths toward becoming project leaders. High performers among those who had left the firm were persuaded to return in senior roles. By 1989, about 50% of Iversen’s project leaders and professionals were women, and 30% were people of color. The 13-member management committee, once exclusively white and male, now included five women and four people of color. Additionally, Iversen had developed a strong contingent of foreign nationals. It was at about this time, however, that tensions began to surface. Senior managers found it hard to believe that, after all the effort to create a fair and mutually respectful work community, some staff members claimed that Iversen had racial discrimination problems. The management sought assistance to study the firm and deliver an outsider’s assessment of its problem.
The challenges of using Discrimination-and-Fairness Paradigm
After only a short time of being inside the firm, it became clear that Iversen’s leaders viewed the dynamics of diversity through the lens of the discrimination-and-fairness paradigm. But where they saw racial discord, the consultants discerned clashing approaches to the actual work of consulting. Their research found that tensions were strongest among midlevel project leaders. Surveys and interviews indicated that white project leaders welcomed demographic diversity as a general sign of progress but that they also thought the new employees were somehow changing the company, pulling it away from its original culture and its mission.
Common criticisms were that African American and Hispanic staff made problems too complex by linking issues the organization had traditionally regarded as unrelated and that they brought on projects that seemed to require greater cultural sensitivity. White male project leaders also complained that their peers who were women and people of color were undermining one of Iversen’s traditional strengths: its hard-core quantitative orientation. For instance, minority project leaders had suggested that Iversen consultants collect information and seek input from others in the client company besides senior managers—that is, from the rank and file and from middle managers. Some had urged Iversen to expand its consulting approach to include the gathering and analysis of qualitative data through interviewing and observation. Indeed, these project leaders had even challenged one of Iversen’s long-standing, core assumptions: that the firm’s reports were objective. They urged Iversen Dunham to recognize and address the subjective aspect of its analyses; the firm could, for example, include in its reports to clients dissenting Iversen views, if any existed. For their part, project leaders who were women and people of color felt that they were not accorded the same level of authority to carry out that work as their white male peers. Moreover, they sensed that those peers were skeptical of their opinions, and they resented that doubts were not voiced openly.
Meanwhile, there also was some concern expressed about tension between white managers and nonwhite subordinates, who claimed they were being treated unfairly. But the consultants’ analysis suggested that the manager-subordinate conflicts were not numerous enough to warrant the attention they were drawing from top management.
The consultants sensed that it was significant that senior managers found it easier to focus on this second type of conflict than on mid-level conflicts about project choice and project definition. Indeed, Iversen Dunham’s focus seemed to be a result of the firm’s reliance on its particular diversity paradigm and the emphasis on fairness and equality. It was relatively easy to diagnose problems in light of those concepts and to devise a solution: just get managers to treat their subordinates more fairly.
In contrast, it was difficult to diagnose peer-to-peer tensions in the framework of this model. Such conflicts were about the very nature of Iversen’s work, not simply unfair treatment. Yes, they were related to identity-group affiliations, but they were not symptomatic of classic racism. It was Iversen’s paradigm that led managers to interpret them as such. It was important to remember that the consultants were asked to assess what was supposed to be a racial discrimination problem. Iversen’s discrimination-and-fairness paradigm had created a kind of cognitive blind spot; and, as a result, the company’s leadership could not frame the problem accurately or solve it effectively. Instead, the company needed a cultural shift—it needed to grasp what to do with its diversity once it had achieved the numbers. If all Iversen Dunham employees were to contribute to the fullest extent, the company would need a paradigm that would encourage open and explicit discussion of what identity-group differences really mean and how they can be used as sources of individual and organizational effectiveness. Many years later, mainly because of senior managers’ resistance to such a cultural transformation, Iversen continues to struggle with the tensions arising from the diversity of its workforce.
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Trouble with native clients
Access Capital International was a U.S. investment bank that in the early 1980s launched an aggressive plan to expand into Europe. Initially, however, Access encountered serious problems opening offices in international markets; the people from the United States who were installed abroad lacked credibility, were ignorant of local cultural norms and market conditions, and simply couldn’t seem to connect with native clients. The bank responded by hiring Europeans who had attended North American business schools and by assigning them in teams to the foreign offices. This strategy was a marked success. Before long, the leaders of Access could take enormous pride in the fact that their European operations were highly profitable and staffed by a truly international corps of professionals. They took to calling the company “the best investment bank in the world.”
Several years passed. Access’s foreign offices continued to thrive, but some leaders were beginning to sense that the company was not fully benefiting from its diversity efforts. Indeed, some even suspected that the bank had made itself vulnerable because of how it had chosen to manage diversity.
A senior executive from the United States explained: “If the French team all resigned tomorrow, what would we do? I’m not sure what we could do! We’ve never attempted to learn what these differences and cultural competencies really are, how they change the process of doing business. What is the German country team actually doing? We don’t know. We know they’re good, but we don’t know the subtleties of how they do what they do. We assumed—and I think correctly—that culture makes a difference, but that’s about as far as we went. We hired Europeans with American M.B.A.’s because we didn’t know why we couldn’t do business in Europe—we just assumed there was something cultural about why we couldn’t connect. And ten years later, we still don’t know what it is. If we knew, then perhaps we could take it and teach it. Which part of the investment banking process is universal and which part of it draws upon particular cultural competencies? What are the commonalities and differences? I may not be German, but maybe I could do better at understanding what it means to be an American doing business in Germany. Our company’s biggest failing is that the department heads in London and the directors of the various country teams have never talked about these cultural identity issues openly. We knew enough to use people’s cultural strengths, as it were, but we never seemed to learn from them.
The challenges of using a access-and-legitimacy paradigm
Access’s story made an important point about the main limitation of the access-and-legitimacy paradigm: under its influence, the motivation for diversity usually emerges from very immediate and often crisis-oriented needs for access and legitimacy—in this case, the need to make deals in European markets. However, once the organization appears to be achieving its goal, the leaders seldom go on to identify and analyze the culturally based skills, beliefs, and practices that worked so well. Nor do they consider how the organization can incorporate and learn from those skills, beliefs, or practices in order to capitalize on diversity in the long run.
Under the access-and-legitimacy paradigm, it was as if the bank’s country teams had become little spin-off companies in their own right, doing their own exotic, slightly mysterious cultural-diversity thing in a niche market of their own, using competencies that for some reason could not become more fully integrated into the larger organization’s understanding of itself. Difference was valued within Access Capital—hence the development of country teams in the first place—but not valued enough that the organization would try to integrate it into the very core of its culture and into its business practices.
Finally, the access-and-legitimacy paradigm can leave some employees feeling exploited. Many organizations using this paradigm have diversified only in those areas in which they interact with particular niche-market segments. In time, many individuals recruited for this function have come to feel devalued and used as they begin to sense that opportunities in other parts of the organization are closed to them. Often the larger organization regards the experience of these employees as more limited or specialized, even though many of them in fact started their careers in the mainstream market before moving to special markets where their cultural backgrounds were a recognized asset. Also, many of these people say that when companies have needed to downsize or narrow their marketing focus, it is the special departments that are often the first to go. That situation creates tenuous and ultimately untenable career paths for employees in the special departments.
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The problem with being exclusively white
Dewey & Levin, was a small public-interest law firm located in a northeastern U.S. city. Although the firm had long been a profitable practice, by the mid-1980s its all-white legal staff had become concerned that the women they represented in employment-related disputes were exclusively white. The firm’s attorneys viewed that fact as a deficiency in light of their mandate to advocate on behalf of all women. Using the thinking behind the access-and-legitimacy paradigm, they also saw it as bad for business.
Shortly thereafter, the firm hired a Hispanic female attorney. The partners’ hope, simply put, was that she would bring in clients from her own community and also demonstrate the firm’s commitment to representing all women. But something even bigger than that happened. The new attorney began introducing ideas to the firm about what kinds of cases it should take on. Senior managers were open to those ideas and pursued them with great success. More women of color were hired, and they, too, brought fresh perspectives. The firm now pursued cases that its previously all-white legal staff would not have thought relevant or appropriate because the link between the firm’s mission and the employment issues involved in the cases would not have been obvious to them. For example, the firm had pursued precedent-setting litigation that challenged English-only policies—an area that it once would have ignored because such policies did not fall under the purview of traditional affirmative-action work. Yet it now saw a link between English-only policies and employment issues for a large group of women—primarily recent immigrants—whom it had previously failed to serve adequately. As one of the white principals explained, the demographic composition of the firm “had affected the work in terms of expanding notions of what are [relevant] issues and taking on issues and framing them in creative ways that would have never been done [with an all-white staff]. It’s really changed the substance—and in that sense enhanced the quality—of our work.”
Dewey & Levin’s increased business success had reinforced its commitment to diversity. In addition, people of color at the firm uniformly reported feeling respected, not simply “brought along as window dressing.” Many of the new attorneys said that their perspectives were heard with a kind of openness and interest they had never experienced before in a work setting. Not surprisingly, the firm has had little difficulty attracting and retaining a competent and diverse professional staff.
The power of learning and effectiveness
If the discrimination-and-fairness paradigm is organized around the theme of assimilation—in which the aim is to achieve a demographically representative workforce whose members treat one another exactly the same—then the access-and-legitimacy paradigm can be regarded as coalescing around an almost opposite concept: differentiation, in which the objective is to place different people where their demographic characteristics match those of important constituents and markets.
The emerging paradigm, in contrast to both, organized itself around the overarching theme of integration. Assimilation goes too far in pursuing sameness. And differentiation overshoots in the other direction. The new model for managing diversity transcends both. Like the fairness paradigm, it promoted equal opportunity for all individuals. And like the access paradigm, it acknowledged cultural differences among people and recognized the value in those differences. Yet this model for managing diversity lets the organization internalize differences among employees so that it learns and grows because of them. Indeed, with the model fully in place, members of the organization could say, We are all on the same team, with our differences—not despite them.
