For some time now, there has been political pushback against initiatives aimed at promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace. Many organizations have invested significant resources to create fairer work environments, which in turn has provided fertile ground for researchers. As these processes are increasingly questioned, Elaine Costa published a meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology to examine which interventions do—and do not—produce results.
She reviewed 70 articles encompassing 208 intervention outcomes, which allowed her to assess the average effect of each type. As we’ve discussed here before, she found that communication-focused interventions—such as diversity training, unconscious bias awareness sessions, and messages about the importance of diversity—generally had little impact. Yet these remain the most common interventions implemented in organizations.
By contrast, she found that the most effective strategies were also the most concrete: structuring evaluation methods, informing decision-makers they would need to justify their choices, and affirmative action programs. However, these are precisely the interventions that tend to be the most controversial or least welcomed by decision-makers. Another strategy that showed some success was when members of disadvantaged groups adapted their communication style to appear more aligned with the majority group—a practice many would see as another form of injustice. Despite the good intentions expressed by many organizational leaders, we are still far from identifying a solution that is both effective and broadly accepted for making workplaces more inclusive.