Why Companies Keep Choosing Diversity Strategies That Fail |
Most strategies devised by managers to increase organizational diversity have actually failed—or even backfired. Why? For example, why have executives at nearly all Fortune 500 companies chosen to use diversity training, despite the reality that this diversity strategy typically does not work—and has in fact been linked to less diversity with respect to ethnicity and gender?
In my new research on Intuitions-at-Work Theory (IWT), I propose the problem is not that all diversity strategies are doomed to fail, but rather that business decisions involving diversity are strongly driven by intuition, and that managers have flawed intuitions about diversity—especially regarding which diversity strategies will fail and which diversity strategies will succeed.
IWT, which integrates and synthesizes prior empirical findings by myself and hundreds of other researchers, suggests that "managers often choose diversity strategies that fail for the same reason they often choose motivational strategies that fail: their…intuitions are systematically biased toward strategies that feel 'salient' (rather than 'subtle'), strategies that feel 'positive' (rather than 'negative'), and strategies that feel 'certain' (rather than 'uncertain')—even when those strategies are suboptimal" (Daniels 2025).
For instance, IWT........