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It is widely accepted that the conflict between women’s family obligations and professional jobs’ long hours lies at the heart of their stalled advancement. Yet research suggests that this “work–family narrative” is incomplete: men also experience it and nevertheless advance; moreover, organizations’ effort to mitigate it through flexible work policies has not improved women’s advancement prospects and often hurts them. Hence this presumed remedy has the perverse effect of perpetuating the problem. Drawing on a case study of a professional service firm, we develop a multilevel theory to explain why organizations are caught in this conundrum. We present data suggesting that the work–family explanation has become a “hegemonic narrative”—a pervasive, status-quo-preserving story that prevails despite countervailing evidence. We then advance systems-psychodynamic theory to show how organizations use this narrative and attendant policies and practices as an unconscious “social defense” to help employees fend off anxieties raised by a 24/7 work culture and to protect organizationally powerful groups—in our case, men and the firm’s leaders—and in so doing, sustain workplace inequality. Due to the social defense, two orthodoxies remain unchallenged—the necessity of long work hours and the inescapability of women’s stalled advancement. The result is that women’s thin representation at senior levels remains in place. We conclude by highlighting contributions to work–family, workplace inequality, and systems-psychodynamic theory.

This paper develops theory about the conditions under which cultural diversity enhances or detracts from work group functioning. From qualitative research in three culturally diverse organizations, we identified three different perspectives on workforce diversity: the integration-and-learning perspective, the access-and-legitimacy perspective, and the discrimination-and-fairness perspective. The perspective on diversity a work group held influenced how people expressed and managed tensions related to diversity, whether those who had been traditionally underrepresented in the organization felt respected and valued by their colleagues, and how people interpreted the meaning of their racial identity at work. These, in turn, had implications for how well the work group and its members functioned. All three perspectives on diversity had been successful in motivating managers to diversify their staffs, but only the integration-and-learning perspective provided the rationale and guidance needed to achieve sustained benefits from diversity. By identifying the conditions that intervene between the demographic composition of a work group and its functioning, our research helps to explain mixed results on the relationship between cultural diversity and work group out-comes.

This study examined the impact of four dimensions of diversity-tenure, age, sex, and race-on performance in 486 retail bank branches and assessed whether employee participation in the firm's diversity education programs influenced these relationships. Data came from archives of the demographic composition of branches, an employee attitude-satisfaction poll, and branch performance assessed as part of the bank's bonus incentive plan. Race and sex diversity were unrelated to performance. The direct effects of tenure and age diversity were largely negative, but were moderated by quality of team processes, suggesting that cooperation and teamwork may suppress potentially task-enhancing differences associated with these aspects of diversity. Diversity education programs had minimal impact on performance. The results of this study suggest that there is a complex relationship between age and tenure diversity and performance and that, even in firms with characteristics that should be conducive to performance benefits from diversity, other conditions must be in place to foster such effects.

This paper examines the impact of women's proportional representation in the upper echelons of organizations on hierarchical and peer relationships among professional women at work. I propose that social identity is the principal mechanism through which the representation of women influences their relationships. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of interview and questionnaire data are used to compare women's same-sex relationships in firms with relatively low and high proportions of senior women. Compared with women in firms with many senior women, women in firms with few senior women were less likely to experience common gender as a positive basis for identification with women, less likely to perceive senior women as role models with legitimate authority, more likely to perceive competition in relationships with women peers, and less likely to find support in these relationships. These results challenge person-centered views about the psychology of women's same-sex work relationships and suggest that social identity may link an organization's demographic composition with individuals' workplace experiences.

A study examined how women's proportional representation in the upper echelons of organizations affects professional women's social constructions of gender differences and gender identity at work. Qualitative and quantitative data were used. The results suggest that sex roles are more stereotypical and more problematic in firms with relatively low proportions of senior women. The study also found that women responded to these constraints in a range of ways; 5 are response profiles are identified. The study challenges prevailing conceptions of gender as an objective property of individuals synonymous with biological sex and universal across organizational settings; instead it supports a more complex view of gender as an ongoing social construction, the meaning, significance, and consequences of which vary as a function of the power differences reflected in the sex composition across levels of an organization's hierarchy.

Shifting frames in team-diversity research: From difference to relationshipsOrganizational research on cultural diversity in teams has tended to focus both theoretically and empirically on differences. In this research stream, diversity is typically defined as the degree of heterogeneity among team members on specified demographic dimensions; theory aims to explain how such heterogeneity affects team processes and performance (for review, see Williams and O'Reilly, 1998). An assumption underlying much of this research has been that difference per se is a source of conflict and hence that teams must minimize members' experience of different-ness from others so as to mitigate diversity's negative effects (Chatman et al., 1998; Dovidio, Kawakami, and Gaertner, 2000; Jehn, Northcraft, and Neale, 1999).In this chapter, we reframe diversity research from a paradigm that emphasizes difference to one that emphasizes relationships. In our approach, while difference remains a defining feature of diversity, it is no longer the principle feature. Rather, our relational approach highlights the personal, interpersonal, and intergroup dynamics that influence how people interpret and act on their differences. From this perspective, difference can also be a source of creativity and resilience. This reframing has implications for how scholars conceptualize and measure diversity and for how they theorize about the conditions that influence whether diversity becomes an asset or a liability.We define cultural diversity as differences among team members in race, ethnicity, gender, religion, nationality, or other dimensions of social identity that are marked by a history of intergroup prejudice, discrimination, or oppression.

The conversation about the treatment of women in the workplace has reached a crescendo of late, and senior leaders are increasingly vocal about a commitment to gender parity. But there's an important catch. The discussions, and many of the initiatives companies have undertaken, too often reflect a faulty belief: that men and women are fundamentally different, by virtue of their genes or their upbringing or both. Of course there are biological differences. But those are not the differences people are usually talking about. One set of assumed differences is marshalled to explain women's failure to achieve parity with men: women negotiate poorly, lack confidence or are too risk-averse. Meta-analyses show that, on average, the sexes are far more similar in their attitudes and skills than popular opinion would have us believe. For decades, studies have examined sex differences on these three dimensions, enabling social scientists to conduct meta-analyses -- investigations that reveal whether or not, on average, sex differences hold, and if so, how large the differences are.