Included but undermined: How representation goals backfire

In recent years, an increasingly common practice amongst organizations has been setting representation goals, or organizational mandates intended to increase the prevalence of underrepresented employees in visible work assignments. The work of meeting these goals often falls to managers, who must also weigh additional criteria – like the employees’ workloads or skillsets – in their task assignments. Typically, when faced with a task assignment decision, managers will refrain from assigning employees who are not available or who do not have the requisite skillset. However, leaning on Tetlock’s theory of value pluralism, we predict that these goals can lead managers to set aside traditional criteria of effective task assignment (specifically, underrepresented employees’ person-job fit and/or workloads) to prioritize achieving these organizational goals. In this way, underrepresented employees are more likely to be assigned to tasks that are sub-optimal for their occupational success (i.e., by being assigned to work that does not appropriately match their skillset or that leads them to be overworked). We examine these predictions in four studies (N = 2,598). We find that this decision-making is driven by managers’ increased diversity concerns (as a consequence of the representation goals), but can be mitigated by how the organization communicates those goals. We conclude by discussing both the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.