Published on: July 8, 2025 at 3:56 pm
Criticism of organizations’ diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives often stems from skepticism about leaders’ true motivation for acknowledging their social responsibilities and all stakeholders’ needs, not just shareholders. Critics fear achievement of business goals, such as maximizing profits.
Academy of Management Scholar Quinetta Roberson of Michigan State University said organizations approach diversity management in many ways. While she believes that much of the criticism of DEI is misplaced, she agrees that it’s fair to question the motivation of leaders for publicly speaking about DEI issues.
“You’ll hear a lot about DEI best practices, and there seems to be an assumption that organizations should have diversity training, employee resource groups, or other initiatives without consideration for what the organization is trying to achieve,” Roberson said. “Our goal was to come up with a framework that organizations could use to determine their approach—not every organization has to be doing all of the things and trying to change the world; if they don’t want to do that, that is fine.
“But acknowledging that we have this level of investment that we want to make, this is how we want to communicate it to stakeholders,” she said. “And so using those two dimensions, specificity of communications about diversity management and scope of investment in diversity management, they can decide with what level of effort and intensity, they want to engage in diversity management.”
Rather than make a value judgment on organizations’ DEI initiatives and messaging, Roberson said to analyze their effectiveness in the context of leaders’ goals.
“If you take like the figurative approach, which is more about this expressed commitment to DEI, it’s not about demonstrating it; it’s not about really putting many resources behind it,” Roberson said.
“For a firm who may just want to look good for shareholders and customers, that is a reasonable approach, but there’s a caveat of there isn’t going to be a culture shift or some kind of deep change in the organization, which would be a more comprehensive approach to DEI, because those are about putting the resources and effort into making a change and actually thinking about ‘what’s the impact?’” she said.
“Leaders should ask themselves, how are we moving the state of the organization to make it better through DEI?”
