The value of public organizations’ diversity reputation in women’s and minorities’ job choice decisions

ABSTRACT

Despite the increasing attention given to promoting demographic diversity in the public sector, empirical explanations of what influences people, particularly women and racial minorities, to work in organizations remain insufficient. Based on signalling theory, we provide a theoretical lens that focuses on organizations’ diversity reputation. Using survey data drawn from the US public and non-profit workforce, it examines whether the public sector, particularly redistributive agencies, attracts people with greater concern for organizations’ diversity reputation. The findings shed light on the importance of individuals’ perceptions of organizations’ reputation for diversity in job choice decisions.

KEYWORDS:

• Organizational reputation
• workforce diversity
• job choice decisions
• public and non-profit sectors
• redistributive agency

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. 4 years was set as the criterion for selecting subsamples for robustness check, which retains relevantly recently hired employees, providing acceptable size of samples.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Danbee Lee

Danbee Lee will receive a Ph.D. in Public Administration from Rutgers University-Newark. She will be joining the School of Public Administration at the University of Nebraska Omaha an assistant professor in September 2020.  Her research interests include public management, organizational behavior, and local government. She is currently working on the formation, measurement, and management of bureaucratic reputation within citizen-state interactions, as well as the effect of reputations on employees’ work attitudes. Her work has been published in Governance and International Review of Administrative Sciences (IRAS).

Yahong Zhang

Dr. Yahong Zhang is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University–Newark. Her research interests include anti-corruption studies, politics-administration relationships, citizen participation, government transparency, public administration education, personnel management, and quantitative research methods. She has published articles in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART), Public Administration Review (PAR), the American Review of Public Administration (ARPA), and Public Performance & Management Review (PPMR).