THE DEI SIGNALING THRESHOLD: WHEN AND WHY MORE MESSAGING IS NOT ALWAYS BETTER

Abstract

When it comes to messaging diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts to employees, organizations take great care in considering the content of the signals they create. However, despite carefully designed communications, they continue to struggle to garner employee support and participation for these initiatives. Counter to the prevailing assumption that more DEI signaling is better (Roberson, 2006; Plaut et al., 2011; Nishii, 2013; Richard et al., 2013; Leslie, 2019; Hunt et al., 2020; Shuman et al., 2023), I argue that positive effects of organizational DEI signaling do not persist with increased exposure to DEI-related stimuli. Leveraging exposure effect research, I instead propose that employee attitudes shift from positive to negative as exposure to signaling increases, thereby decreasing their desire to engage with DEI at work. Specifically, I hypothesize that low and moderate levels of signaling are associated with employees feeling more engagement towards DEI, but at higher DEI fatigue and cynicism are more likely to develop, negatively impacting employees’ DEI effort. I further posit that because managers play a central role in shaping employee attitudes and behaviors, a manager’s consistency with organizational DEI signaling is the key to minimizing negative employee attitudes that emerge because of overexposure. I test these hypotheses in an experiment and a field study with implications for the literatures on DEI in organizations, issue fatigue, and behavioral integrity.