Diversity-oriented leadership, internal communication, and employee outcomes: a perspective of racial minority employees

ABSTRACT

Based on a sample of 633 racial minority employees in the United States, the current study examined the effectiveness of diversity-oriented leadership on internal communication and key employee outcomes. Using the normative model of internal communication and organizational justice theory, this study advances the theoretical links among leadership, communication, and organizational justice, and their resulting effects on employee outcomes. The survey results showed that diversity-oriented leadership enhances symmetrical internal communication and racial minority employees’ perceived fairness of the organization, thereby increasing employee engagement and advocative behaviors. Theoretical implications for public relations and internal communication are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Diversity-oriented leadership
• symmetrical internal communication
• employee engagement
• employee advocacy
• organizational justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Although public relations scholars have used the two terms – internal communication and employee communication – interchangeably (e.g., J. N. Kim & Rhee, 2011; Men, 2014;Walden et al., 2017), this study uses internal communication to delineate organizations’ communication with their employees as a function of public relations (cf. Men & Bowen, 2016).

2. As noted, this study focused on racial/ethnic minority employees as major study participants to expand the current literature on minority employees in public relations scholarship (e.g., Len-Rios, 1998; Zerbinos & Clanton, 1993). While the importance of racial/ethnic diversity in public relations practices has been recognized (Logan, 2021; Pompper, 2004), few studies have explored the unique experiences and perspectives of U.S. racial minority employees. Incorporating their perspectives helps to cultivate the theoretical understanding of internal communication as a critical function of public relations, in facilitating diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

3. Note that participants in this study are likely to be “racial/ethnic minorities” both in U.S. society and within their organizations. They identified themselves as racial/ethnic minorities in the U.S society in general. Additionally, the majority of the participants (68%) responded that their coworkers within organizations are mostly of different race/ethnicity from themselves. The mean value of the estimated percentage of coworkers who are racially similar to the participants was 27%.

4. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) results showed that the second-order factor model fit the data well: χ²(451) = 1696.683, RMSEA = .066 [.063, .069], CFI = .945, TLI = .940, SRMR = .041, providing evidence that procedural, distributive, and interactional justice were all good indicators of organizational justice.

5. SEM is often used to identify a model that explains the interrelated relationships among multiple latent variables simultaneously (Kline, 2015). As the main purpose of this study was to test the proposed model (Figure 1), which contained five latent variables, SEM allowed us to investigate the plausibility of the theoretical model by parsimoniously reproducing the means and covariances that summarized the data.