This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University with Talking Management for The Globe and Mail. Today I am in Vancouver, sitting down with Zoe Kinias from INSEAD, a leading business school just outside of Paris.
Zoe, you did a study about helping women perform better to their more natural abilities in the MBA, is there any lessons we can take away from the organizational setting or the company setting?
KINIAS - Absolutely. So we have been thinking a lot about how to apply our prior research in different types of organization settings, and we know, for example, that women are severely under-represented particularly in high levels of the banking industry, and we can think of other examples of this.
So what these organizations might be able to do is to have their employees again sort of bring their whole selves into the organization context. And what we have been thinking about during on boarding processes, during promotion periods, at the points where people would start to become aware of that thing in the room, the sense that maybe they don't belong, by reflecting on their personal values and what matters to them, and who they want to be as individual people in their workplace.
It would be important to do this at the time someone is transitioning into an organization or into a role where they might start to experience some discomfort or a potential threat as a result of a particular social identity.
MOORE – What are some other groups that could be advantaged by this?
KINIAS - Any group that is under-performing relative to indicator of their ability. So in the U.S. context, I don't know the data to say with certainly, but it could be that ethnic minority group members are under-performing.
Outside the U.S. context, whenever there is a group that is under-represented and not performing as a dominant or a majority group, then this could be relevant for them.