Prompt 1) The standard way of thinking about diversity policies has it that they are instrumental in stimulating minority leadership and impacting leadership self-perceptions of minority categories in organizations. However, by manipulating the environment to the degree in which they did in Gundemir et al’s argument, I was left wondering what would happen if they spent time in actual environments, those known to have undergone diversion policy integration, to see how it’s operating without any manipulations. This was such a scientific experiment, it seemed to lack an experiential human component of observation and witness. In tern eliminating a sense of the call and response of human interaction that takes place on a daily basis in the workplace.
Prompt 2) While many might automatically assume that any efforts to expand on and progress any type of diversity in the workplace, whether we are looking at how diversity is framed, or the opportunities and challenges diversity brings to a workplace; they are efforts generally determined as good works automatically. Gundemir et al make very thorough attempts to show factual data of the findings of their research, and Austin and Pisano speak very freely about the current low standard deviation of neurodiversity in our society. They both implicate clearly why and what the challenges are in changing certain low standard deviations when it comes to diversity in the workplace. I wonder though, by just bringing these things to attention, is there actual impact from this that is scalable? Not in the diversity itself, but the research being done about diversity.
Please comment on your initial post to answer the other part of Question 1–“explain what you’ve done and how it went. Did you find this approach to framing useful? How/why/why not?” (In short, I’m asking you to reflect on the TSIS approach you used.)
Yes, this is a scientific study, as opposed to analysis of an actual workplace. The authors specifically address that question in their article–they presume some of their readers will want to know why they’ve done it this way–by saying that they designed an experiment that would help to control for some of the multitude of factors that might affect employees’ perceptions (i.e. a particular leader within the company) because they wanted to 1) look closely at causation and 2) have a larger, more diverse sample than what they would be able to find in any one organization.
Now, that doesn’t mean their findings are universally applicable or that this is the only valuable way of studying such issues. Rather, they’re injecting *one* perspective into the broader conversation that surrounds these issues, and offering us *a* (but not the *only*) way of thinking about them.