United States: New research reveals that Black employees who experience mistreatment at work face more severe consequences than their white counterparts.
According to the study, these Black workers get about 100 fewer minutes of sleep each night compared to both white workers and Black workers who aren’t mistreated. They are also more likely to show signs of depression.
Historical Context and Perceptions of Racial Bias
As reported by Researchers believe this is partly due to America’s history of racial prejudice. The study found that mistreated Black employees are nearly eight times more likely to see their mistreatment as racially motivated compared to mistreated white employees, who are less likely to connect their treatment to race and generally cope better.
“Our findings are not intended to put the onus on Black employees for being too sensitive, but to inform organizations that mistreatment is experienced within the context of one’s identity,” said researcher Erik Gonzalez-Mule, chair of management and entrepreneurship with the Indiana University School of Business.
Call for Inclusive Workplaces
There are some organizations that must stive to create an inclusive workplace for their Black Employees and should find the ways to reduce the workplace mistreatment for example by implementing accountability measures or encouraging bystander intervention” Gonzalez-Mule added in a university news release.
Study Details and Methodology
For this particular study the team first analyzed data gathered from more than 3,500 people as part of the study on midlife health conducted by a University of Winconsin-Madison’s Institute on Aging.
Participants were asked about the workplace mistreatment and some of them were asked to wear devices that monitored their sleep of fill out the questionaries assessing the depression symptoms.
The results indicated the reality that workplace mistreatment with depression and loss of sleep was specific to Black employees only.
In the second wave of the study, the authors advertised online and invited 480 participants, who filled in the questionnaire based on their memory of an occasion they felt they were treated unfairly by a colleague or manager.
For that mistreatment, results indicated that Black people were more likely to consider race as the cause.
These were recently reported in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
Recommendations for Organizations
The researchers suggested that firms may have to go the extra distance to achieve DEI beyond paying mere lip service to them.
“Most of them have primarily concentrated on the diversity angle and where attention has been paid it has been mainly on how to increase the diversity of employee populations,” the team noted in the study.
They continued, ‘We advise managers to embrace the cliché that ‘diversity means being invited to the ball; inclusion means being invited to dance.’ Workplace discrimination represents the epitome of non-inclusiveness, regardless of whether such exclusion is uniform across racial groups.