Understanding Gender Equality Policy and Practice Gaps Through the Lens of Organisational Justice: Development of an Employee Alignment Model

Policies and actions to address gender inequalities are widespread across a range of institutional and organisational contexts. Concerns have been raised about the efficacy and impacts of such measures in the absence of sustained evaluation of these activities. It has been proposed that important contextual factors may propel or inhibit measures to promote gender equality, including a critical mass of women, role models, diverse leaders and inclusive organisational cultures. This paper explores relationships between organisational justice and equality interventions to better understand gaps between equality policies and practices using a comparative case study approach in a male-dominated sector. A combination of questionnaire and interview data analysis with employees in three case organisations in the construction sector are used to outline links between perceptions of gender equality initiatives and organisational justice, and the mechanisms used to reinforce in-group dominance. The findings culminate in the development of an Employee Alignment Model and a discussion of how this relates to the organisational climate for gender equality work. The findings suggest that the development of interactional organisational justice is an important precursor for successful gender equality interventions in organisations. These findings have implications for those looking to minimize unintentional harm of policies or interventions to improve gender equality.

Developing an employee recognition program that promotes learning across the organization

Purpose Recognition programs have proven to be a useful tool in engaging employees and helping align them around a common purpose. In this case, study the organization created a recognition program that promoted learning across the organization. The easy to follow steps provided herein can be replicated by leaders in any organization. Design/methodology/approach The case study provides a quick reflection of the steps taken by the organization to create a recognition program that linked behaviors, tactical actions and corporate strategy in a way that engaged all toward learning together. Findings With the new program, the organization not only improved employee engagement and alignment around four critical behaviors, the organization also witnessed employee alignment around strategic vision and revenue improvements. Originality/value Studies find that employee engagement is seriously lacking. Studies also find that employee engagement is beneficial to employee contribution and employee success. Recognition programs have been described as one method to improve engagement. This case study illustrates how an organization was able to implement such a program.

Planned Organizational Identity Change

In this chapter, drawing from past research on organizational identity change and our observations at several companies that have engaged in such an effort, we develop a framework of planned organizational identity change. In particular, we shed light on how organizations use new identity claims to bring about a deliberate change in their identity. Our framework suggests that such initiatives focus on communicating identity to both internal and external stakeholders. Further, while these initiatives aim at ensuring employee alignment in the internal audience (i.e., organizational members), the goal in the case of external audience is managing reputation. We illustrate the framework with an example of a Dutch funeral insurance and care organization—DELA—that brought about identity change in this manner. Finally, we discuss several research and practice implications based on the framework.