Evan Apfelbaum: The risks of ignoring race in the workplace

From CNN Opinion

Larry, one of the employees you supervise, hasn’t been performing his job up to expectations. But you’ve been reluctant to take him aside and speak with him candidly: Like most senior people in the company, you are white. What if Larry, who is black, takes your criticism the wrong way or, worse, thinks you are racist?

The last thing you want is for others to think your actions were influenced by race. So you’ve held off talking to him about performance issues that you’d likely have raised with your non-minority employees. You’re relieved that a potentially thorny situation was averted, even pleased with your capacity to be so racially sensitive.

Read the full post at CNN Opinion

Evan Apfelbaum is Assistant Professor of Organization Studies at MIT Sloan School of Management

What do you think?

This entry was written by pjdenning, posted on January 31, 2012 at 9:55 am, filed under Organizational Studies and tagged affirmative action, CNN, colorblindness, diversity, Evan Apfelbaum, management practice, managers, minorities, MIT Sloan, multicultrual, neuroscience, psychology, psychopath, race, racism, workplace. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

One Comment

Bonnie

Posted February 1, 2012 at 2:20 am | Permalink | Reply

Yes, the situation now is very different. No one wants to be put on the “racist” label, especially the stakeholder. However, I do think that the senior supervisor should talk to Larry about his performance personally and directly, or things would be worse.