Pro-diversity beliefs and intergroup relations

ABSTRACT

Modern societies and organisations are becoming increasingly diverse, leading many to argue that diversity should be valued because it can benefit teams, organisations and societies more widely. Considerable attention in both organisational and social psychological research has been devoted to so-called pro-diversity beliefs (i.e. the idea that diversity has an instrumental value to groups), and the consequences of these for various outcomes. In this paper, we focus on the role and relevance of PDBs in understanding intergroup relations, and review research on antecedents, consequences, and correlates thereof. We introduce the concept of PDBs more generally before drawing a more directed focus on interethnic relations, thereby contextualising PDBs within theorising on interethnic ideologies and approaches to diversity more generally. Moreover, we delineate potential strategies to facilitate PDBs but also outline boundary conditions, before ending with a discussion of recommendations concerning the practical implications of research on PDBs.

KEYWORDS:

• Diversity
• pro-diversity beliefs
• multiculturalism
• intergroup relations

Acknowledgments

The studies described in this review are the result of team work. We would, hence, like to acknowledge the contributions of our co-authors Constanze Beierlein, Oliver Christ, Christian Issmer, Johannes Nau, Thomas Pettigrew, Sebastian Stegmann, Stefan Thörner, Rolf van Dick, and Ulrich Wagner as well as the work of the student assistants involved– first and foremost Kathrin Budel and Julian Reichert. We would also like to thank Sarina Schäfer, the editors Gordon Hodson and Rhiannon Turner, as well as three anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier version of this article.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ Only after having designed and validated this scale did we become aware of a scale designed by Hofhuis et al. (2015). This scale includes the subscale measuring the benefits of diversity for creativity in an organisational setting. The items of this subscale are largely in line with our conceptualisation of PDBs.

² The work by Hofhuis et al. (2015) showed contradictory evidence concerning the relationship between diversity views and threats. Focusing on different types of benefits of diversity more widely in a range of domains, the authors found that perceived benefits of diversity were by and large unrelated to feelings of realistic threat but were related with greater symbolic threat. However, conceptualisations and operationalisation varied substantially between studies.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under grant (KA 4028/2-1 – awarded to the first author).