Social Injustice and Workplace Behavior: How #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo and Islamist terrorist attacks Shape Cooperation in Organizations

In this project I explore the effect of diversity-related societal events on workplace cooperation.

Throughout the recent decade a number of large-scale cultural and political events have continued to draw attention to threats like racism, sexism, and discrimination.

Prominent examples of such events are the #MeToo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, or Islamic terrorism in Europe.

Despite the prominence of these events in public discourse, we don’t know the consequences of this mega-threats for the cooperation and interaction between co-workers in organizations.

In this project, I deploy a novel interdisciplinary approach, in which I combine insights from the emerging “macro” literature in sociology and management and their effect on organizations and the large existing “micro” literature in psychology on diverse work teams and behavioral strategy in order to develop and test novel hypotheses about how diversity related large-scale events that occur in organizations´ larger social context affect the cooperation in diverse teams and the decision-making in organizations.

I will focus on four related research questions: 1) How did the #BlackLivesMatter movement affect the cooperation between black and white co-workers? 2) How did the #MeToo movement affect the cooperation between male and female co-workers? 3) How did Islamist terrorist attacks in Europe affect the cooperation between Islamic and Non-Islamic co-workers? and 4)How can managers and business leaders manage issues arising from mega-threats?

In order to test my prediction I will collect a novel large scale database including information on diversity related mega-threats from Twitter and media reports and combine it with data on the cooperation in organizations.

The ambitious goal of this interdisciplinary project is to open a research stream which strives to develop an understanding on how macro societal events affect our micro behavior with other co-workers in organzations.