Diversity, Representation, and Performance: Evidence about Race and Ethnicity in Public Organizations

In the past twenty years, the growing percentages of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States have led scholars to pay increased attention to the issue of diversity. However, very little research using the public organization as the unit of analysis has sought to understand the true impact of workforce diversity on work-related outcomes. This study seeks to understand the impact of one type of diversity-race and ethnicity-on organizational outcomes in public education. Using data from Texas public school districts, the article finds that diversity among managers is unrelated to the three performance outcomes tested, while diversity among teachers is negatively related to one and positively related to two performance outcomes. Representation among managers, on the other hand, is positively related to all three performance outcomes, while representation of teachers is negatively related to one of the outcomes. In the past twenty years, the growing percentages of racial minorities in the United States have brought diversity to the attention of public management and policy scholarship. Public administration research has recently considered an abundance of diversity-related issues, including racial integration of federal agencies (Corwell and Kellough 1994; Kellough 1990; Kellough and Elliott 1992), private versus public sector diversity management initiatives (Dobbs 1996), and problems with diversity program implementation (Riccucci 1997; Von Bergen, Soper, and Foster 2002). Universities have created courses in diversity management, which have led to a number of new textbooks in the past ten years (Chemers, Oskamp, and Costanzo 1995; Henderson 1994; Riccucci 2002). However, much of the work on diversity stems from a normative view that any diversity leads to positive consequences (Wise and Tschirhart 2002). With few exceptions (Wise and Tschirhart 2000), the research has not attempted to assess the real value of diversity. Many, if not most, articles on diversity that appear in the core public management journals are case studies of diversity programs, statistical analyses of workforce trends, or "best Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Georgetown Public Management Research Conference, Washington, DC, October 9-11, 2003, and at the Seminar on the Determinants of Performance in Public Organizations, Cardiff, Wales, May 6-8, 2004. Special thanks to Kenneth Meier, Laurence O'Toole, and Lois Wise for their helpful comments and suggestions. Address correspondence to the author at pitts@cviog.uga.edu. doi: 10.1 093/jopart/muiO33 Advance Access publication on March 10, 2005 ? The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.28 on Tue, 30 Aug 2016 05:22:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 616 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory practices" studies. Although case studies can be valuable tools through which to build theory, they should be supplemented by quantitative research. Work in social psychology and business administration has been using quantitative methods to test hypotheses connecting diversity and performance (Wise and Tschirhart 2000). Demographic changes warrant the attention of further research. In 1980 whites made up 80 percent of the total U.S. population.1 By 2000, that figure had decreased to only 69 percent, while all other racial and ethnic groups in the United States had increased. This represents a substantial population shift in a relatively short period of time, and evidence suggests that diversity will continue to increase into the twenty-first century (Johnston and Packer 2000). Globalization and related economic changes in the United States have combined to create unforeseen levels of racial and ethnic heterogeneity. Along these same lines, more people are speaking languages other than English at home, people with disabilities are becoming more functional with better technology and changing social attitudes, and the baby boom population has increased the number of retired, older citizens. The United States is becoming increasingly diverse on a number of dimensions. The labor force is experiencing similar trends, and estimates project that white men will account for only 37 percent of the U.S. workforce by 2008.2 Studies have shown that U.S. workers are becoming older and more balanced with respect to gender and race, particularly in the public sector (Bond, Galinsky, and Swanberg 1998; Johnston and Packer 1990). The typical assumption is that these changes in the workforce and population require greater efforts toward hiring and retaining diverse employees. Some research argues that diversity is necessary in order for organizations to be "competitive" (see particularly Thomas 1991). However, whether diversity among agency employees results in increased organizational performance is an empirical question that is rarely tested in the public administration literature (Wise and Tschirhart 2000).3 This article takes on three interrelated questions as its focus. Does racial diversity increase or decrease organizational performance? Does racial representation-matching agency employees to characteristics of the target population increase or decrease performance? Are these relationships different for street-level bureaucrat diversity and manager diversity? After reviewing the relevant literatures, I will examine the impact of racial diversity on a series of performance outcomes in one public policy setting. RESEARCH ON DIVERSITY Representative Bureaucracy Two streams of research touch on the issue of public sector organizational diversity: representative bureaucracy and research on diversity effects. Representative bureaucracy considers whether a public organization employs a bureaucracy that matches the general population on salient indicators of diversity, such as race, ethnicity, or gender (Meier and Nigro 1976; Mosher 1968; Pitkin 1967; Selden 1997). The theory holds that passive I All of these population statistics can be located at http://www.censusscope.org/us/chart_race.html (accessed January 2005). 2 Workforce projection statistics are available from the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics at http://stats.bls.gov (accessed January 2005). 3 Recruiting and retaining more diverse employees is a legitimate normative goal for government organizations, but it is nevertheless necessary to understand the impact of increased diversity so that management strategies can be developed. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.28 on Tue, 30 Aug 2016 05:22:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Pitts Diversity, Representation, and Performance representation-the bureaucracy matches the general population on these indicators-will lead to active representation, which is the formulation of policies that will benefit the interests of diverse groups (Meier 1993a; Mosher 1968). The link between passive and active representation is premised on research showing that people from similar backgrounds race, for example-will have similar values and beliefs (Meier 1976; Mosher 1968; Pitkin 1967; Selden 1997). For example, representative bureaucracy at its simplest suggests that, based on shared values and beliefs, a black bureaucrat will be more likely than a white bureaucrat to represent the policy preferences of black citizens. This notion was an early basis for affirmative action in the public sector (Selden and Selden 2001). However, for active representation to occur, and for representative bureaucracy to make sense, bureaucrats must be afforded discretion in their jobs vis-a-vis policymaking or implementation, and the policy issue must be salient to the specific group being represented (Keiser et al. 2002; Meier 1993a; Selden 1997; Sowa and Selden 2003). Even if these criteria are met, passive representation does not always result in active representation, and ongoing research has attempted to identify factors that result in a link between the two (Keiser et al. 2002; Meier 1993b; Selden 1997). This line of research has shown the benefits of representation in the public education policy setting (Keiser et al. 2002; Meier and O'Toole 2001; Meier, Wrinkle, and Polinard 1999; but see Nielsen and Wolf 2001), as well as in federal agencies (Dolan 2000; Hindera 1993). Little work has considered representative bureaucracy as it relates to agency performance per se. Rather, most studies of representative bureaucracy seek to understand whether a given group benefits from representation in government. The aggregation of benefits for all of these groups implicitly constitutes agency performance, so the issue is more in framing the question than in the substance of conclusions drawn in research. However, in an era of results-based government and increased support for businesslike accountability mechanisms, it is relevant to consider representation as it explicitly relates to agency performance, and this subtle distinction is one that has not been made in the literature.