Author: Caitlin Spillane

1. It has become common today for diversity in leadership positions to be ignored and overlooked despite statistics proving that more diversity results in more productivity, creativity, and altogether, a much better atmosphere.  For about the past twenty years there has been little to no change regarding this problem, which indicates that many companies do not see this diversity issue as it really is.  Gundemir et al addresses the problem in the article The Impact of Organizational Diversity Policies on Minority Employees’ Leadership Self-Perceptions and Goals and mentions ways to potentially address it, such as Multiculturalism or Value-in-Individual Differences policies.

I decided to use the prompt “It has become common today to dismiss…” but chose to exclude the “to dismiss” part because I thought that saying exactly what was common better accentuated my point.  The reason I decided on this prompt was because many of the others required more of my opinion, something that was assumed, or more of a debate set up.  Personally, those templates did not appeal to me due to the nature of the article and how I interpreted it.  I utilized the chosen template to state the problem and then used my next sentence to bring up the potential solutions Gundemir et al suggested.  Templates are very useful to me because I usually get stuck writing when I do not have some form of guidance so I am enjoying learning more from Graff and Birkenstein.

3. The decisions companies make have the ability to impact everyone that already works for them and those attempting to get hired.  Both the Gundemir et al article The Impact of Organizational Diversity Policies on Minority Employees’ Leadership Self-Perceptions and Goals and the Austin and Pisano article address the need for more diversity in the workplace, whether racial diversity in leadership positions or an increase in neurodivergence people.  Both articles talk about how the increase in diversity in either aspect results in positive outcomes and, in many cases, increases in productivity.  Specifically, from Austin and Pisano’s article we know that the reason neurodivergence in so important is due to the fact that many neurodivergent people are able to recognize patterns and certain aspects of their jobs that many neurotypical people do not pick up on.  Unfortunately, due to the hiring process these individuals are more often than not overlooked because of the very rigid criteria that many neurodivergent people do not consciously abide by, such as difficulty interviewing, ability to demonstrate emotional intelligence, being a team player, etc.  It is important to bring awareness to the companies that could really benefit from the inclusion of neurodivergent people and have an increase of diversity everywhere.

Something fun that happened this past week was that my friends from Syracuse stayed with me so I was able to show them around the Philly area and down the shore before they had to travel back to Scotland where they’re from.

1. Some researchable questions that the Watkins read: What is organizational culture and why should we care? personally evoked for me are mostly related to the time and data pool in which he conducted his research.  When I first started reading this article I realized that it was very outdated, since it occurred in May of 2013, more than eight years ago. This makes me wonder how different the responses would be if Watkins repeated this research more recently.  Another aspect of his research that made me a bit skeptical is that the only people invited into the survey were from LinkedIn.  So therefore that only people who heard about the survey had to already be a part of the organization, which largely narrowed down the data pool.  I also noted that out of the nine perspectives, only one was from a female.  It just made me wonder if the data in his research was slightly skewed and not completely accurate to current times and a wide range of people/genders. 

3) One aspect from the article Why diversity matters that sparked a big interest in me, was when the authors started to discuss the disparities between different countries and how diverse the executive teams are for each of them.  It is very discouraging to see that 97 percent of the United States fails to represent the racial demographic composition of the country’s population.  Even the United Kingdom, which does much better than the United States, still falls short of racial diversity with only 22 percent of companies that are racially diverse.  I think that this practice of not being diverse in companies goes back to the idea of organizational culture.  The first perspective in Watkins’ article quotes Aristotle, “we are what we repeatedly do”.  For much of America’s history, the only people allowed to hold a place in power were white men.  This practice is unfortunately still carried out often, evident in the very low statistics regarding racial and gender diversity.  The article titled Why diversity matters was written in 2015, so there is hope that the statistics have improved over the last 6 years, but no matter the improvement, there is still much to do to become truly diverse in the work field.