As many companies aim to build diverse workforces, candidates from historically marginalized communities unfair recruitment practices and limited opportunities. Building an equitable organization starts during the hiring process, with potential supervisors playing a major role in making applicants feel comfortable.

New research from the �������� and other institutions examines the impact of leadership style on prospective Black employees who apply for jobs in less-diverse companies. During selection, these applicants often experience, or a fear of being mistreated due to negative stereotypes about their racial group. This can cause candidates to withdraw from the hiring process.

The researchers studied the effects of two moral leadership styles — ethical and authentic — on candidates. Authentic leadership follows an internal compass, drawing on personal experiences and values. Ethical leadership complies with community norms: Ethical leaders provide candidates with an outline of group values and accepted behaviors, emphasize universal ethical principles and establish a clear reward and punishment system. When supervisors demonstrate their leadership styles during the hiring process, they offer candidates an idea of how a future employee will be treated in daily interactions.

The study, recently published in the , shows that when a white manager is interviewing a Black candidate, ethical leadership is more helpful in reducing threat and increasing willingness to apply for a job.

“Our data aligned with the idea that, if I’m a Black person and my would-be manager is white and showing authentic leadership, it’s going to be hard for me to predict what that’s going to mean,” said, co-author and associate professor of management and organization in the UW Foster School of Business. “And if I do predict it, racism is so common that I might predict something that wouldn’t help me.

“It’s better in this case if my would-be manager is using an ethical style, therefore following community norms, so I can learn those norms. In other words: If there are rules to the game, and they’re going to follow them, then I can figure out the rules and we can work together well.”

Authentic leadership, which emphasizes individual experiences and beliefs, makes applicants feel more comfortable when the supervisor is from the same racial group. In this case, applicants are likely to identify with someone from a similar background. Since candidates in this situation are typically no longer concerned about unfair treatment, they are more likely to view authentic leadership as an opportunity to develop their own individuality in the workplace.

To reach these conclusions, the researchers conducted five experiments with nearly 500 Black residents of Brazilian favelas, or impoverished neighborhoods. Two of the studies included real-world job recruitment processes and physiological measures of stress: salivary cortisol and blood pressure. The results suggest that interactions with potential direct supervisors can reduce stereotype threat, which boosts Black applicants’ desire to join an organization. However, the leader’s identity determines whether these interactions feel positive or not.

“During recruitment, people from marginalized groups can experience this unpleasant feeling that they will be negatively stereotyped and face discrimination in their future job,” said, corresponding author and assistant professor at Neoma Business School in France. “Because of that, they decide to either avoid these threatening companies or withdraw their application from the hiring process.”

Past research shows that job interviews and site visits are likely to trigger stereotype threat due to high pressure and the fact that most managers at many organizations are white. While organizational strategies — such as diversity-oriented policies — have benefits, they can also create the perception that marginalized groups are being singled out.

“Our research f provides an answer for what a recruiting manager can do in their own capacity regardless of company policies,” Lagowska said.

Since a behavioral adjustment from leadership can make candidates from marginalized groups feel more comfortable, there is reason to reevaluate the increasing use of automated recruitment tools. Companies often use such tools to optimize searches and avoid bias, but these results suggest that increasing interactions with managers could help attract more diverse talent.

“If you’re really trying to get leadership styles right, it has to go beyond the policies themselves,” Hafenbrack said. “You can’t mandate something like this. This is about intuition and the understanding of the situation. Assuming a manager cares about inclusion and wants to reduce stereotype threat, it’s a nuanced process for them to make this shift. If you’re using an ethical leadership style, it must feel real.”

Other co-authors were and of the Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration in Rio de Janeiro and of the IESEG School of Management in Paris. Funding for this research was supported by grants from Coordination of Superior Level Staff Improvement, the Brazilian Research Council and the Rio de Janeiro Research Foundation.

For more information, contact Hafenbrack at ahaf@uw.edu.

Three �������� researchers have been selected as Fulbright Scholars for 2023-2024 and will pursue studies in Portugal, Mexico and Sweden.

The scholars are , an assistant professor in the Foster School of Business; , an assistant professor in the Department of Speech & Hearing Sciences; and , a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Oceanography.

Fulbright Scholars are college and university faculty, administrators and researchers, as well as artists and professionals, who build their skills and connections, gain valuable international insights and return home to share their experiences with their students and colleagues.

for academics and professionals awards more than 1,700 fellowships each year, enabling 800 U.S. scholars to go abroad and 900 visiting scholars to come to the United States. The Fulbright Program is the flagship international exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government. The UW is one of 17 institutions nationwide recognized in 2022-2023 as a “Top Producer” of both Fulbright scholars and students.

The UW Fulbright Scholar selectees for 2023-2023 are:

Hafenbrack is an assistant professor of management and organization and Evert McCabe Endowed Fellow at the UW Foster School of Business.

Hafenbrack, who spent four years on the faculty of Católica-Lisbon School of Business & Economics in Portugal before joining the UW, will return in spring 2024 to collect additional interview data for research documenting how Airbnb has changed the culture of Lisbon. He also will collaborate with Portugal-based co-authors on a project about mindfulness meditation.

An expert on the efficacy of mindfulness meditation, Hafenbrack’s research has been published in top management journals and featured in The New York Times, Financial Times, Forbes, Businessweek, NPR and BBC, and other popular media outlets. In 2018, he was named one of the world’s “Best 40 Under 40 Business School Professors” by Poets & Quants. He received the Foster School’s PhD Mentoring Award in 2022.

Pace is an assistant professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences.

Pace will be hosted by the Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados (CINVESTAV) Unidad Mérida (Mexico) in the Department of Human Ecology. She will pursue a project entitled, “See, Say, Do, Learn: Bilingual Ideologies and Practices in Contemporary Yucatec Maya Families.”

Pace’s research focuses on how children’s language learning skills interact with the structure, quality and contexts of linguistic exposure to support bilingual development in children with and without language disorders.

Prend is postdoctoral researcher in the UW School of Oceanography.

Prend will be hosted by the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, where he will pursue a project titled, “Regional Variability of Air-Sea-Ice Interactions in the Southern Ocean.”

Prend is a climate scientist studying ocean-atmosphere exchange and sea ice dynamics in the Antarctic. He received a doctorate in physical oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where he was awarded the Jean Fort Dissertation Prize for his research. He is a NOAA Climate & Global Change postdoctoral fellow with a joint appointment at UW and California Institute of Technology.

How can businesses improve employee well-being without sacrificing profits?

That will be the topic of conversation Friday evening as faculty experts from the �������� Foster School of Business share their perspectives and research in a series of short talks:

The speakers are , associate professor of management; , assistant professor of management and organization; , professor of marketing; , associate professor of management; and , the inaugural Dean’s Impact Scholar at the Foster School and vice president and global head of inclusion, diversity, equity and action at Lululemon.

Gupta studies topics related to business, politics and society. He will speak on the growing phenomenon of employee activism. Employees are increasingly speaking out against corporate employers for what they see as irresponsible behaviors, Gupta said, often risking their careers and livelihoods.

“I will describe the macro trends that have fueled the rise of employee activism, and the factors that explain why some activists are more successful than others,” Gupta said. “The goal is to share ideas that can unlock the full potential of employee activism to enhance corporate citizenship and social welfare.”

Hafenbrack’s research centers around psychological processes that affect the workplace. He will speak on the benefits and drawbacks of meditation as a tool in the workplace, including how a small amount of meditation in specific situations can often change a person’s life for the better — but sometimes for the worse.

“You just need to know the difference between when it is helpful and when it isn’t,” Hafenbrack said. “I will also explain why celebrities like Arianna Huffington, Phil Jackson and Deepak Chopra don’t like my research on meditation.”

Schlosser’s talk will highlight how social media can influence the way consumers present themselves. Because computer-mediated communication allows speakers to remain anonymous and less aware of audience reactions, it would seem to allow people to be their true selves. But that hasn’t been the case, Schlosser said.

“In the over 25 years since social media sites were introduced, people continue to communicate information that seems acceptable and held by the majority,” said Schlosser, who studies computer-mediated communication and internet marketing. “I’ll also discuss implications for consumer well-being and the ‘spiral of silence.’”

Fehr, whose research focuses on building positive relationships at work, will discuss how a culture of gratitude is often missing from organizations, despite research that suggests gratitude can have a lasting effect on well-being, strength of relationships and success at work. His talk will examine the “gratitude gap” —  the difference in the amount of gratitude people hope for at work and what actually transpires.

“My work focuses on helping employees build high-quality connections with each other,” Fehr said. “Especially in a time of growing social division and virtual work, I argue that organizations must help employees forge high-quality relationships with each other if they are to succeed.”

Jones, who has spent more than 20 years working with corporations on domestic and international matters of DEI, will talk about navigating the corporate DEI space as well as approaches organizations can take to create healthy, inclusive and equitable workplaces for individuals and society.

Mindfulness meditation is a stress-management practice with ancient lineage that cultivates nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment, often by directing attention to the physical sensations of breathing. Initially inspired by centuries-old Buddhist practices consisting of philosophies and meditations together, today a secular version of mindfulness — consisting of meditations alone — is becoming increasingly popular.

There are phone apps that help generate self-awareness and many big corporations are folding mindfulness training programs into their curriculums. But there may be an unanticipated downside to secular mindfulness meditation practices, according to new research led by the ��������’s Foster School of Business, and published in the .

“Meditating can reduce feelings of guilt, thus limiting reactions like generosity that are important to human relationships,” said lead author , an assistant professor in the Foster School who studies mindfulness.

Researchers wanted to know how mindfulness meditation reduces negative emotions, like anger and guilt.

“Negative emotions may not be pleasant, but they can help us navigate social situations and maintain relationships,” Hafenbrack said.

“If someone gets really angry and they yell at their boss, or something, and they get fired or make people feel unsafe, then you know that’s a bad thing,” Hafenbrack said. “Not all negative emotions are the same in terms of the kinds of behaviors that they queue up, though.”

When people feel guilty, it tends to make them focus outward, on other people, which can promote reparative actions.

“Meditating for short periods of time is a tool that can make people feel better, like popping an aspirin when they have a headache,” Hafenbrack said. “We have a responsibility as researchers to share not only the many positive effects of meditation, but also the inadvertent side effects, such as the potential for it to occasionally relax one’s moral compass.”

To better understand meditation practices, the researchers conducted eight experiments with more than 1,400 participants in the U.S. and Portugal. Participants varied for each experiment – some were U.S. adults recruited online, some were graduate students attending a university in Portugal, while another group was mostly undergraduates at the Wharton School of Business.

In their first study, the researchers demonstrated that mindfulness does reduce feelings of guilt. Participants were randomly assigned to either write about a past situation that made them feel guilty or write about their previous day. Then, they listened to either an eight-minute guided mindfulness meditation recording that instructed them to focus on the physical sensations of breathing or an eight-minute control condition recording in which they were instructed to let their minds wander. Participants who listened to the mindfulness recording reported feeling less guilt compared to those in the mind-wandering control group. This was true whether they had written about a guilty situation or their previous day.

The team then ran six other experiments to test whether mindfulness meditation would influence prosocial reparative behaviors, like making up with a friend after doing something that caused harm.

For example, in two experiments all participants were asked to recall and write about a time they wronged someone and felt guilty, before being randomly assigned to meditate or not. After that, they were asked to allocate a hypothetical $100 between a birthday gift for the person they had wronged, a charity for African flood victims, and themselves. Participants who had meditated allocated approximately 17% less to the person they had wronged compared to those who had not meditated.

The psychological process behind these allocation differences was reduced guilt. These and three other, similar experiments established that mindfulness meditation reduces the tendency to make amends for harming others.

“This research serves as a caution to people who might be tempted to use mindfulness meditation to reduce emotions that are unpleasant, but necessary to support moral thoughts and behavior,” said co-author , an assistant professor at ESSEC Business School in Cergy-Pointoise, France.

While focused breathing meditation is the most popular form of meditation, used in mindfulness programs such as the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction approach and Google’s Search Inside Yourself, the study also explored loving kindness meditation, which appears in those programs as well. Loving kindness meditation consists of imagery exercises in which one evokes other people and sends wishes that each is happy, well and free from suffering.

In the final experiment, participants once again wrote about a time they wronged someone and felt guilty, before listening to either a focused breathing mindfulness meditation recording or a loving kindness meditation recording. Participants in the loving kindness group reported higher intentions to contact, apologize to, and make up with people they had harmed compared to participants in the focused breathing meditation group. The difference was explained by participants’ increased focus on others and feelings of love.

“Our research suggests that loving kindness meditation may allow people to have the stress-reduction benefits of meditation without the cost of reducing repair, because it increases focus on others and feelings of love,” said co-author Matthew LaPalme, who was a research scientist at Yale University and now works at Amazon.

The study first appeared online on Dec. 23, 2021. The research was supported by the Católica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics, the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, the Wharton Behavioral Lab, INSEAD and the �������� Foster School.

For more information, contact Hafenbrack at ahaf@uw.edu.