What’s in It for Me? Perspective Taking as an Intervention for Improving Attitudes Toward Diversity Management

Abstract

Hospitality organizations are increasingly investing in diversity management to address the reality of a diverse hospitality workforce. The effectiveness of diversity management highly depends on employee supportive attitudes; however, extant research shows that not all employees have positive attitudes toward diversity management. Using experimental methods, the current study examines situational perspective taking of discrimination—imagining being the target of workplace discrimination—as an intervention to influence the perceived utility and importance of diversity management using frontline hotel managers (Study 1) and hospitality students seeking careers in hospitality (Study 2) with two different methods of collecting data. Both studies showed that situational perspective taking of discrimination increases the perceived utility and importance of diversity management. Mediation analyses showed that it is through inducing negative affect that situational perspective taking leads to more positive attitudes toward diversity management. The results provide insight for hospitality organizations that use corporate websites and other recruitment activities to promote support for diversity management. Specifically, organizations should prime egocentric biases by emphasizing that diversity management protects all employees, regardless of different demographic characteristics, from workplace discrimination.