UC Irvine

As the workforce has become increasingly diverse, many organizations have responded by implementing various approaches to managing workforce diversity, including formal diversity policies. Organizational diversity policies are widespread in organizations; however, scholars are only beginning to examine the impact of diversity policies on the attitudes and behaviors of dominant group employees (i.e., usually White employees). Although diversity policies often target underrepresented groups, dominant groups are still exposed to them and such exposure could impact their attitudes and behavior. This dissertation contributes to the nascent area of study of dominant group reactions to diversity policies by finding support for dominant group blowback to organizational diversity policies. Study 1, an online experiment conducted on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and Study 2, a field experiment in an organizational setting, found support for such blowback in the form of increased turnover intentions and decreased organizational citizenship behavior for dominant group members. However, such blowback did not take the form of counterproductive work behavior. Study 3, an online experiment conducted on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, did not find any differences in unethical behavior for dominant group members exposed to a diversity policy or a neutral mission statement. This suggests that the dominant group blowback does not take the form of active harm against the organization. The three studies also did not find differences in justice perceptions when participants were exposed to a diversity policy or neutral mission statement. Taken together, these research findings suggest that diversity policies can have unintended consequences. The findings of the three studies provide an empirically grounded understanding of the dominant group blowback to diversity policies and make significant theoretical contributions to the fields of diversity in organizations, human resource management, and organizational retaliatory behavior. Theoretical and practical implications of these three studies are discussed, as are limitations and future research directions.