Research consistently shows that White employees tend to have larger and more advantageous professional networks compared to their Black counterparts. However, there are competing hypotheses regarding the drivers of these differences. Drawing on theory about the mechanisms underlying tie formation and the conditions under which racial beliefs are activated within organizations, we propose that triadic closure—the process of forming connections through mutual contacts—drives racial disparities in networks beyond what can be explained by unequal access or direct individual behaviors (e.g., homophily). We further predict that these disparities are most likely in high-stakes work contexts, where heightened work demands and scrutiny activate racial beliefs. To test our hypotheses, we leverage the random assignment of 2,984 new hires to initial project teams in a global professional services firm, allowing us to causally estimate tie formation rates in an organizational setting where initial access to ties is randomly distributed. We find that Black and White new hires form ties at similar rates when interacting directly with coworkers, in the absence of mutual contacts. However, Black new hires are significantly less likely to form ties through shared contacts. This racial gap is most pronounced in high-stakes contexts, such as client-facing projects, where Black employees are 18% less likely to form ties through shared contacts than their White counterparts. These results identify the critical effect of triadic closure for producing racial disparities in networks. Thus, it is essential to understand how organizational practices of relying on networks for employees' career success inadvertently produce racial inequality in the workplace.

This paper investigates how having more White coworkers influences the subsequent retention and promotion of Black women. Studying 9,037 new hires at a professional services firm, we first document large racial turnover and promotion gaps: even after controlling for observable characteristics, Black employees are 6.7 percentage points (32%) more likely to turn over within two years and 18.7 percentage points (26%) less likely to be promoted on time than their White counterparts. The largest turnover gap is between Black and White women, at 8.9 percentage points (51%). We argue that initial assignment to project teams is conditionally random, based on placebo tests and qualitative evidence. Under the assumption of conditional random assignment, we show that a one standard deviation (20.8 percentage points) increase in the share of White coworkers is associated with a 15.8 percentage point increase in turnover and an 11.5 percentage point decrease in promotion for Black women. We refer to these effects as intersectional: Black women are the only race-gender group whose turnover and promotion is negatively impacted by White coworkers. We explore potential causal pathways through which these peer effects may emerge: Black women who were initially assigned to Whiter teams are subsequently more likely to be labeled as low performers and report fewer billable hours, both of which are predictors of higher turnover and lower promotion for all employees. Our findings contribute to the literatures on peer effects, intersectionality, and the practice of managing race and gender inequality in organizations.

Which emotions are contagious, and who is more susceptible to catching them? Women are often viewed as conduits of emotional expression, an assumption that relies on gendered patterns established in face-to-face communication, and that overlooks the role of professional gendered emotion-display expectations. In text-based electronic communication, which influences how emotions spread, I argue that women are more susceptible than men to negative—but not to positive—emotional contagion because echoing another’s negativity enables them to circumvent gendered restrictions on originating negativity. I test this theory using the emotional content of 425,649 one-to-one email threads exchanged over six years between 30,346 dyads among 710 full-time employees at a technology firm. Women are more susceptible than men to reproducing their colleagues’ negative emotions, which they are otherwise 14.7 percent less likely than men to express at work. Women are 10.6 percent more likely than men to originate expressions of emotional positivity; overall, people are more immune to positive than to negative emotional contagion. This study illustrates how both gender and the medium by which emotions are expressed shape women’s susceptibility to emotional contagions. The implications of such emotional vulnerability for research on emotional contagion, gender, and communication in organizations are also discussed.

In recent decades, diversity training has become a frequently used tool in efforts to reduce bias and increase inclusion in organizations. However, the effectiveness of diversity training has been called into question. The content and methods of diversity training programs vary widely, making it difficult to scientifically evaluate their effectiveness. Using a database of programs marketed to human resource professionals, we analyze advertised descriptions of 163 organizational diversity training programs and characterize their described content and methodologies. Our analysis generated themes about the ways training programs are designed to intervene (e.g., combating bias and stereotypes, fostering positive intergroup relations, reaping benefits from diversity), the goals they purport to achieve (e.g., bias reduction, cultural competence, increased productivity, employee satisfaction), and the forms the programs take (e.g., individual self-paced e-learning, live group training). Based on our analysis of what training providers promise and what research tells us such training can do, we discuss three key challenges to these programs’ effectiveness in addressing organizational inequalities and to our ability to assess their effectiveness. We conclude by offering five recommendations to better align diversity training with the outcomes that providers and organizational leaders expect it to achieve.

This paper uses systems psychodynamic concepts to develop theory about the persistence of racial inequality in U.S. organizations and to inform an approach for disrupting it. We treat White men as the dominant group and Black people as the archetypal subordinate group in U.S. society. In our theory, work contexts that conflate merit with idealized images of White masculinity provoke unconscious distress in White men who aspire to meet those ideals. An unconscious, multilevel defense system, comprising projective identification at the individual level bolstered by a social defense at the organization level, keeps this distress at bay. This system diverts attention away from the real culprit—work contexts that threaten White men’s self-worth—by contriving and making credible a substitute problem—a shortage of “qualified” Black people. At the same time, the social defense fuels the very work contexts that pose threats to White men in the first place. The upshot is the persistence of racial inequality. We offer guidance on how to disrupt these dynamics by building mutually reinforcing holding environments where organization members can engage in intrapsychic and intergroup reparative work. We conclude by offering theoretical contributions to the literatures on race, organizational inequality, systems psychodynamics, and masculinity.

When deciding whom to ally with or avoid, people benefit from assessing the quantity and quality of strangers’ relationships with others. How accurately do people make such social network assessments? Across three lab studies and one preregistered field study, we tested whether people (total N = 1,545) could make accurate judgments about a stranger’s (total N = 709) social network characteristics after watching brief thin slice videos of the stranger or negotiating with them. The findings consistently demonstrated that perceivers accurately detected the size of a stranger’s social networks and their gender and family composition, based on theoretically relevant social-behavioral tendencies and traits (e.g., extraversion, gender), but not how interconnected these social networks were. Perceivers also missed cues that could have facilitated greater accuracy. These data advance theory about adaptive social decision making in psychology, network science, sociology, and organizational behavior. We also provide the freely available Social Network Accuracy Test (SNAT) for future research: (https://osf.io/zgbse).

Brief interventions that strengthen an individual’s sense of social belonging have been shown to improve outcomes for members of underrepresented, marginalized groups in educational settings. This paper reports insights based on an attempt to apply this type of intervention in the technology sector. Adapting a social-belonging intervention from educational psychology, we implemented a quasi-random field experiment, spanning twelve months, with 506 newly hired engineers (24% female) in the R&D function of a west coast technology firm. We did not find a statistically significant effect of the treatment on a core attainment outcome—bonus relative to base salary—that exhibited a significant gender gap, with women receiving proportionally lower bonuses than men. We did not find anticipated gender gaps in promotion rates or social network centrality, and we also did not find a statistically significant effect of the treatment for women on these outcomes. Drawing on meaningful differences between educational versus workplace settings, we identify four theoretical moderators that might influence the efficacy of social-belonging interventions adapted from educational settings into the workplace. Finally, based on the limitations of our study design, we provide four recommendations that future researchers might adopt.

This article examines how exposure to violent crime events affects employers’ decisions to hire black job applicants with and without a criminal record. Results of a quasi-experimental research design drawing on a correspondence study of 368 job applications submitted to 184 hiring establishments in Oakland, California, and archival data of 5,226 crime events indicate that callback rates were 11 percentage points lower for black job applicants than for white or Hispanic applicants and 12 percentage points lower for those with a criminal record than those without one. Recent exposure to nearby violent crimes reduced employers’ likelihood of calling back black job applicants by 10 percentage points, whether or not they had a criminal record, but did not have the same effect on callback rates for white or Hispanic applicants.

How people fit into social groups is a core topic of investigation across multiple sociological subfields, including education, immigration, and organizations. In this chapter, we synthesize findings from these literatures to develop an overarching framework for conceptualizing and measuring the level of cultural fit and the dynamics of enculturation between individuals and social groups. We distinguish between the cognitive and behavioral dimensions of fitting in, which previous work has tended to either examine in isolation or to conflate. Reviewing the literature through this lens enables us to identify the strengths and limitations of unitary—that is, primarily cognitive or primarily behavioral—approaches to studying cultural fit. In contrast, we develop a theoretical framework that integrates the two perspectives and highlights the value of considering their interplay over time. We then identify promising theoretical pathways that can link the two dimensions of cultural fit. We conclude by discussing the implications of pursuing these conceptual routes for research methods and provide some illustrative examples of such work.