The challenges faced by CEO's in championing a diversity change process

This ethnographic study looks at the challenges corporate CEOs faced as leaders responsible for the financial success of a business during a time of social change. Racial and gender diversity are the specific social change issues addressed in the study. The participants were leaders of U.S. companies, white males in their 40s and 50s whose organizations engaged in a diversity change initiative during their tenure as leaders. Each participant engaged in two in-depth, semi-structured interviews; they also completed an "auto-photography" self-identity exercise in which they took photographs to describe themselves non-verbally, making use of a projective technique. The purpose of the study was to determine how these CEOs were affected personally and professionally by their involvement in a diversity change initiative.; The study results indicate the CEOs' primary motivation for supporting a diversity change effort was the desire to enhance the success of the business by capitalizing on the racial and gender diversity of their organizations. This belief was based on hunches and intuition, not on concrete financial data validating the assumption that diversity is good for the business. Their organizations did not build measurement activities into the diversity change process to substantiate this assumption. The CEOs did not exert leadership to require their organizations to identify goals and timelines for achieving a fully diverse senior management team. The CEOs though the change effort interfered with the daily operation of the business when there was turmoil and dissention among employees after they attended diversity awareness training sessions.; The data suggest that the CEOs were not adequately prepared by their human resource staffs or the external consultants for the predictable outcomes of a diversity change process. The CEOs showed a lack of psychological sophistication about how the change effort would affect them and their employees. As leaders, they expected to harness the diversity of the workforce to improve the bottom line; they were frustrated by the unexpected dissonance in their companies, and the perceived accompanying loss of productivity. The CEOs face the challenge of living in several different worlds with conflicting interests and values. The absence of research data linking financial success and diversity in the workforce added to their ambivalence about the overall benefits of a diversity change process. The study has implications for how internal and external human resource professionals support CEOs in future diversity change initiatives.