Increased political polarization in the workplace has blindsided corporate executives, leaving them “rudderless” and ill-equipped to manage these challenges.
Senior managers have little guidance on how to navigate both rising employee activism and public pressure on issues, including reproductive rights, gender and racial equity, and gun control, according to Alison Taylor, an executive director at New York University Stern School of Business’s Ethical Systems group. She interviewed about 20 executives from blue-chip corporations as well as smaller companies for a project examining societal divisions in corporate America. Taylor plans to publish her findings in a forthcoming report.
“Polarization is advancing so quickly that executives” find themselves “lost and rudderless,” she said in an interview. “One of the things that makes the current moment so challenging is that the problems are both internal and external, and then there’s a feedback loop.”
There’s a lack of research and expertise on how to handle more overt political conflicts at work, she said, adding that studies show C-suites have become more politically split since 2013 despite the increase in gender and racial diversity. Political beliefs don’t come with legal protections, and who makes up the minority politically differs between workplaces, Taylor said.
Galvanized by movements such as MeToo and Black Lives Matter, Generation Z and Millennials have come to expect their employers to take a stance on a myriad of issues. At the same time, groups such as the Business Roundtable, a lobbyist for large corporations, and the World Economic Forum have said corporations should lead their businesses for the benefit of not only shareholders but also employees and other stakeholders. Such efforts have sparked backlash from Republicans who deride such efforts as “woke capitalism.”
For Generation Z employees especially, their jobs and who they work for have become more central to their individual identities, and that’s raising their expectations, influence and power within corporations, Taylor said. Given the current political dysfunction in the US, they look to powerful organizations such as their employers to amplify their voice and take action on their behalf, Taylor said.
A survey published last month by nonprofit Catalyst found that almost a third of employees are considering leaving their jobs because of how their employers responded to the US Supreme Court decision that overturned the federal right to an abortion. Companies from Amazon.com Inc. to Tesla Inc. said they would pay for travel costs for employees seeking out-of-state abortions.
“Companies have encouraged all this speaking up, and I would argue leveraged it for their own branding advantage, and now they’re dealing with the aftermath,” she said.
Taylor said those she interviewed reported that companies often have a dominant top-down political bias, and that has led to a “chilling effect” on dissenting opinions. For example, while Silicon Valley and Wall Street generally lean politically left and right respectively, it can create “an inherently hostile environment” for conservatives in tech and liberals in finance, Taylor said.
Since companies are facing pressures on different fronts—such as their public positioning on issues and political spending, which is now becoming a source of employee activism—there isn’t one person that a chief executive can delegate to resolve the conflicts, Taylor said. The problems are partly government relations, human resources, marketing and environmental, social and governance or sustainability, she said.
Solutions that Taylor recommends include companies creating committees of managers from across business departments to help make decisions on public positioning. Corporations also need to enact stronger social media policies, while decisions on corporate political spending should be delegated to boards, she said.
“There needs to be more pluralism and tolerance, or companies should just stop making social statements altogether and end their political spending,” Taylor said.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.