Mandating change: The impact of court-ordered policy changes on managerial diversity (Hirsh & Cha, 2017)

Although the authors did not provide details for each individual case that legally required the establishment of employee grievance procedures, these policies were summarized as concrete policies to build diversity efforts into the organizational structure of the establishments. Employee grievance procedures establish dedicated procedures or departments for employees to raise any claims of identity-based bias in the workplace. The use of this intervention aims to empower employees to pursue equitable workplace practices and proactively reduce bias in the workplace.  

The study used a nonexperimental design to estimate the impact of court-ordered establishment of employee grievance procedures on the representation of white women, black women, and black men employed in managerial positions separately. Study authors used data from high-profile employment discrimination lawsuits settled from 1996 through 2008 that required the firm to implement employee grievance procedures in the court settlements or verdicts for each subsidiary establishment. The authors measured managerial diversity one year following the lawsuit settlement or verdict. In addition to controlling for unobservable characteristics, the statistical model controlled for several lawsuit and organizational characteristics such as monetary awards for plaintiffs, the number of plaintiffs and lawsuits that each firm faced, establishment size, firm size, the percent of white male managers, within-establishment labor supply and local labor market, and the year.