Most strategies designed by managers to increase organizational diversity have failed or backfired. Why? For instance, why have executives in nearly all Fortune 500 firms decided to use diversity training, even though this diversity strategy generally does not work and has actually been linked to less (not more) diversity? To address this puzzle, I introduce Intuitions-at-Work Theory (IWT), which proposes that organizational behavior is fundamentally driven by two types of intuitions: reactive intuitions and proactive intuitions. Reactive intuitions are people's intuition-driven behavioral responses to triggers in their organizational environments - including traditional economic incentives (i.e., external rewards/penalties), psychological nudges (e.g., framing), and behavioral organization (e.g., how behaviors are structurally arranged across people or sequenced within individuals). Proactive intuitions are people's intuition-driven behavioral strategies for creating, designing, and reshaping the organizational environment and its triggers - especially in ways that leverage other people's reactive intuitions - to achieve their goals. IWT argues that managers often choose diversity strategies that fail for the same reason they often choose motivational strategies that fail: their proactive intuitions are systematically biased toward strategies that feel "salient" (rather than "subtle"), strategies that feel "positive" (rather than "negative"), and strategies that feel "certain" (rather than "uncertain") - even when those strategies are suboptimal. IWT challenges and integrates prior theoretical frameworks by proposing that people are both intuitive decision makers who (mis)react to their organizational environments and also intuitive choice architects who (mis)design those environments. This gives rise to a causal loop between intuitions and diversity in organizations, where diversity triggers intuitions and intuitions shape diversity. But because proactive intuitions are biased toward strategies that feel "salient," "positive," and "certain," managers' proactive intuitions and targets' reactive intuitions will be systematically misaligned, leading to three paradoxes: powerful diversity strategies (e.g., diversity reminders just before hiring decisions) can feel too subtle to use, good diversity strategies (e.g., joint evaluation where candidates are assessed side-by-side) can feel too bad to use, and reliable diversity strategies (e.g., anonymizing resumes) can feel too unreliable to use. Strikingly, executives - those with the most power to shape organizations - appear to exhibit the worst proactive intuitions of any sample population studied to date. IWT highlights that diversity researchers and management scholars must expand beyond investigating what works to also investigating intuitions about what works and how to align intuitions with what works.
Inequality is pervasive, challenging people and organizations. Yet we lack a clear picture of how people navigate inequality in everyday social and organizational life. I propose a theory of stereotype negotiation—whereby people use voice (linguistic expression), body (nonverbal expression), and culture (expressed preferences) to counter stereotypes applied to their own social identity group and comply with stereotypes applied to their audience’s social identity group. I first synthesize research on the function, content, and costs of stereotypes. I then construct a behavioral, multi-level model of stereotype negotiation, including individual, interpersonal, and institutional antecedents and consequences. I close with a future research agenda to nuance our understanding of how people, as informed and agentic actors, navigate an increasingly diverse and unequal world: one interaction at a time.
The platform economy is an increasingly large segment of the contemporary economy that continues to attract workers, drawing on narratives of self-empowerment and entrepreneurship that are idolized within American culture. Yet, the realized lived experiences of workers are often anything but that of a flourishing entrepreneur, with many describing economic precarity, invasive and unpredictable algorithmic control, and demanding hours. What keeps people invested in returning to platform work? We label this observed contradiction the platform paradox, and we theorize how this paradox is continuously regenerated through neo-normative control, a modern form of workplace control that encourages workers to express their ‘authentic’ selves, individuality, and emotions in ways that align with organizational goals. Drawing on extant scholarship, we identify three neo-normative control mechanisms—framing self-as-product, whole self-integration, and hyper-gamification—that support platform workers in experiencing themselves as independent entrepreneurs while also increasing their control by the platform and its algorithmic management system. We illustrate how these controls collectively contribute to adverse consequences on two core work experiences: worker skill and worker time. We propose future research directions to further unpack this paradox and for the field of platform scholarship at-large, discussing implications for inequality.
