People and organizations have an inherent preference for stability, and seek to create social structures and interactions that are meaningful, and that resists the eroding forces of time. At the individual level, this preference for stability can be seen in personality theories. Most personality theories describe human action as originating from discomfort with something that is unknown or a psychologically disruptive event. When such discomfort occurs, we are motivated to remove the discomfort to achieve psychological equilibrium and stability. For example, according to Freud, human action is a result of unresolved issues in our unconscious. Even in cognitive theories of personality, anxiety is defined as an element that is beyond the realm of, and that threatens one's construct system. According to these theories, human action consequently results in order to alleviate or remove the psychological discomfort. These theories can be understood as equilibrium theories, that describe how people are perpetually seeking to reestablish psychological equilibrium, and will, when possible, avoid situations that will cause psychological discomfort. Destabilization is seen as the culprit for a plethora of psychological problems. Organization theories also have focused on stabilizing processes such as structuration - the how of organizing; How do organizations come into being and become established? And institutionalization, how organizations seek to be embedded in legitimate meaning systems, and how they evolve to become similar to other established organizations. Institutional theory has identified underlying pressures that act upon organizations through legitimization, so that organizational survival is dependent on organizations being able to conform to environmental norms. When we look at the objective of organizations for the past century, it has been to maximize standardization. In order to achieve efficiency and performance. It's only recently that there is a movement away from standardization. But control systems that systematically monitor, and measure, and report organizational activities, is another good example of a powerful stabilizing tool. So we can understand individuals as seeking psychological equilibrium, and organizations as seeking and maintaining stability - of structure, of meaning and of actions. In the case of the individual, the stability attained through psychological balance, gives ourselves and others a consistent notion of who we are. For organizations, stability is equated with the recognizable organizational identity. For example, you may be familiar with the study of Disneyland as an exemplar case of strong organizational identity, which allows its stakeholders to understand, and adhere to the Disneyland experience. So what happens when organizations need to change and evolve? In order to change and evolve, individuals need to step out of their comfort zone and to seek psychological disequilibrium. In the same way, organizations need to step away from stabilizing forces. And to deliberately create instability in the structure and in organizational processes. For individuals, one of the easiest ways of doing this is to travel to new places, where people don't have the same habits or customs. Think back to the last time you visited a new country for pleasure or for work, where you didn't understand the local language. How did you feel? How did you manage? When I ask this question in my intercultural management course, students generally say that they enjoy the discovery process, eating new food, learning new customs, learning the language, seeing how people just do things differently. They enjoy the challenge that is inherent in the discovery process. At the same time, they also admit that it is difficult and tiring to be always trying new things. And they feel frustrated that they cannot express themselves fully. And that the nuances in communication are lost in translation. Whether such experiences lead to the confirmation of the individual's attachment to their comfort zone or, to seek more destabilizing thrills, depends on the situation and also the individual. Some global managers talk about the thrill zone of doing business internationally - Knowing that embarrassment and failure may be just around the corner. Needless to say, such experiences put individuals to a test. And regardless of the long term outcome, this movement away from stability and equilibrium either results in future avoidance of diversity, or in incremental or more dramatic change for the individual. When you think about it, an international experience is a diversity experience. In this case, it's the cultural diversity that is at the heart of the destabilization and learning. Similarly, organizations also experience diversity as a destabilizing factor. When Air France and KLM merged in 2004, this sent shock waves through middle management at Air France, as they were confronted amongst other things, by the need to exchange regularly in English. At a daily functional level, this was an important hurdle that needed to be addressed in order for French managers to feel comfortable, and to be able to express themselves confidently in meetings. Similarly, the Japanese staff at Nissan was shocked, not only by the more prominent changes that were introduced when they merged with Renault, such as massive layoffs and cutting off suppliers who'd worked for Nissan for generations, But also by daily management actions, such as French colleagues not taking the office garbage to the main garbage disposal. Something that the Japanese managers did. Both are cases that have since proved successful, from a business perspective, partly due to the advantages achieved through these disruptions. The ongoing discussion and the accumulating knowledge, concerning the impact of having women on corporate boards, attests to the fact that there is a business case that is developing for diversity and inclusion, and therefore disruption of the status quo.. According to a study that interviewed Norwegian corporate board members, directors believed that women deliberated and evaluated risks more thoroughly, thereby enhancing the quality of board decisions overall and more generally, corporate governance. So, diversity is a means to create disruptions to the routine for both individuals and organizations. It is also a source of instability and disequilibrium, which are both sources of psychological discomfort. Diversity therefore almost systematically generates resistance to this discomfort. However, despite the challenges the accumulating evidence of the benefits of diversity in conjunction with environmental pressures for change, is gradually pushing organizations over the threshold of resistance to embracing diversity and inclusion.
