Disentangling Valuing Multiculturalism, Perspective-Taking, and Ethno-Cultural Empathy As Inclusive Leadership Skills

Background and Purpose: At the heart of social service organizations are workers on the frontlines, who day after day connect individuals, communities, and organizations with needed services despite a rapidly changing socio-political environment. Those not on the frontlines often fulfill key administrative and supervisory roles. Organizations rely on employees at all levels to work through cross-cultural differences and communicate productively to drive positive long-term organizational effectiveness. Absent constructive dialogue and collaboration, social service organizations will find it difficult to change effectively, generate new programs, and introduce improvements to existing work processes. This presentation focuses on disentangling inclusive leadership skills (valuing multiculturalism, perspective-taking, and ethno-cultural empathy) in the impact on promoting teamwork and employee voice (i.e., speaking up).

Methods: Using a cross-sectional data of a sample of 453 individuals working in nonprofit (38.1%), public (35.1%), and business (26.7%) sectors, path analysis was employed to test the relationships among study variables. Data were collected as a part of a project focused on developing an online assessment tool to develop leaders in work and community settings. The hypothesized model controlled for personality factors (extraversion, dependability, and creativity) and tested whether valuing multiculturalism, perspective-taking, and ethno-cultural empathy had a differential impact on teamwork and employee voice.

Results: Findings revealed that the hypothesized model yielded a good model fit (RMSEA =.028, CFI = .993, NFI = .976), accounting for 13.1% of the explained variance in teamwork and 29.7% in employee voice. While some differences based on personality characteristics were found, further examination of path coefficients showed positive and significant relationships among: perspective-taking and teamwork (β = .298) and  ethno-cultural empathy  and speaking up (β = .230) as key findings.

Conclusions and Study Implications: Study findings point to the value of building skill in perspective-taking and ethno-cultural empathy in encouraging teamwork behaviors and motivating people to speak up for positive change.  Findings also suggest moving beyond awareness building (such as through valuing of multiculturalism) to demonstrating empathic understanding as inclusive leadership skills. These key findings, study limitations, and the theoretical and practical implications will be discussed as part of this symposium.