GPA

3.58

RedditCatalog

This course is designed to help students more effectively manage self, peers, teams, clients and firms in diverse organizational settings and lead change. People and leaders in organizations are constantly working with members of different backgrounds, social identities, and experiences, fostering increased attention to diversity and inclusion in an employment and organizational context. [1] For example, women represent over half of the labor for 57% (BLS, 2018) [2] but are severely under-represented at senior management levels and in high-paying technical and professional fields (Kossek & Buzzanell, 2018) [3] Ethnic and racial minorities are also severely under-represented. The U.S. population is increasingly diverse as 40% of the population identifies as racial or ethnic minorities (U.S. Bureau of Census, 2019) including African-American (13.4%), Hispanic-American (18.3%), Asian-American (5.9%), American Indian or Alaska Native (1.3%), and European American (60%) as well as a growing number of individuals who identify with more than one race or ethnicity (U.S. Bureau of Census, 2019) [4] Further, 26% of the population has some form of disability, and 16% are over the age of 65 (U.S. Bureau of Census, 2018). Many other minority groups can face workplace marginalization challenges such as veterans, minority religious group members (Muslims, Jews, Hinduism; Catholic; Latter-day Saints), immigrants, people with mental or intellectual disabilities, & LGBTQ persons (Stone, Lukaszewski, & Dulebohn, 2020) [5] When leveraged effectively, these differences in social identity and values can help attract and retain talent, strengthen societal and community economic equality, support organizational and team effectiveness; but when overlooked, or mismanaged, these differences can increase turnover, conflict, stress, talent under-utilization, and harm career and work-life well-being, and productivity. The class focuses on management of gender and diversity for inclusion and equity from an individual employee, leader and team/organizational perspective in a workplace context. The goal of this class is to take a multi-level approach to help you learn how to lead the management of diversity and inclusion through a) improving your ability to work in diverse teams, as well as b) developing your ability to lead, develop, and implement strategies to foster cultural and structural change to support the management of gender and diversity toward enhanced organizational effectiveness. Men, as well as women, majority and minority individuals, will be able to leverage the skills taught in this course when making their own career decisions, as well as when managing, being managed by, or collaborating with others; or leading and changing organizations to support new ways of working. We integrate multiple levels and lenses to understand diversity and inclusion. From an individual leadership perspective, we tackle the question: "Why does diversity matter in employing organizations and business, what is the state-of-the-art evidence-based knowledge, and what does it mean to me personally in my career and my leadership beliefs." Specifically, we focus on the business and social science processes including attitudes toward in-groups and out-groups, stereotyping, identity, privilege, and power, intersectionality, discrimination, bias, equity influence opportunity, bystander awareness, and perspective taking - this affects how members of different social groups perceive and interact with one another. Since managing social identity increasingly involves managing work-life boundaries and work and non-work public and private selves, we will also learn about authenticity choices and social and public/professional identity boundary management. From an organizational and group perspective, we address the question: "What are best practices for successful diversity management?" We will focus on organizational and institutional structures and cultures and their relations to strategies for creating diversity through management practices; how to create an inclusive culture and positive climate for inclusion and talent management and developing and retaining diverse talent and foster innovation and organizational effectiveness across multiple levels of intervention (individual, group, intergroup, organizational, and societal). We discuss how to conduct an organizational diagnosis of the current diversity climate and barriers and facilitators for creating a multicultural workplace and a flexible environment supportive of many identities, and how assumptions may vary across industry and cultural contexts.

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