Diversity management approaches for organizational justice: Insights from Belgian hospitals

Diversity management is adopted by organizations in the pursuit of fairness and justice. The main question addressed by the current paper is whether all approaches to diversity management are positively related to organizational justice. We hypothesize that identity-conscious approaches, such as learning and integration, are more beneficial to organizational justice compared to identity-blind approaches, such as fairness discrimination and access legitimacy. We tested this hypothesis in a study conducted in Belgian hospitals with 367 employees who varied in gender, age, tenure, and position in the organization. Based on multiple regression analyses, we found that the learning and integration approach, as well as the fairness discrimination, was positively related to all dimensions of organizational justice. The access-legitimacy was perceived to be the most common approach in hospitals but was unrelated to organizational justice. The effects were moderated by employees' gender and position for two diversity approaches, so female employees benefited less from fairness discrimination, while the low-position employees benefited more from access-legitimacy. We discussed the theoretical and practical implications of those findings.