Question

Describe organizational barriers that put people at a disadvantage for promotion, including corporate culture and the pipeline theory. Use anecdotes from your experiences with these types of barriers.

Answer 1

The organizational barriers refers to Obstacles in the way of communication, information flow, achievement of business objectives, innovation, and anything else good for the business. The obstacles can be rules and procedures that are too extensive or too limited, cultural attitudes, rigid hierarchy, lack of talent, limited information sharing, centralized decision making, lack of employee or customer involvement, and more.

Glass ceiling: when companies say everyone has equal opportunity for advancement, however, women stop getting promoted at a certain level.

Corporate culture: “Those who take advantage of workplace leave and flexibility programs are often marginalized” meaning that women who take maternity leave or time off to raise kids are no longer considered for promotions the same way

Pipeline theory : The theory that women do not obtain as much human capital as men because they have less work experience as a result of childbearing, household duties, and insufficient education.

Glass cliff: men are given better positions because the positions are of high risk and women are not trusted to be responsible for them.

The impenetrable barriers between women and the executive suite were subsequently reaffirmed in the fact-finding report issued by the Glass Ceiling Commission in 1995.² At that time, the commission noted that only 3 to 5 percent of senior management positions in Fortune 500 companies were filled by women. The commission also found that where women held senior positions, their compensation was lower than that of their male counterparts. Furthermore, the commission's findings showed that for women who were in senior positions, the types of positions they held were in areas such as human resources or research, which are not part of the usual pipeline or career pathway to executive positions.³

The commission reported several barriers to the success of women and minorities in reaching the top echelons of management. These included societal, governmental, internal business, and business structural barriers.⁴ Among societal barriers were those associated with opportunity and attainment, prejudice and bias, and cultural, gender, and color-based differences. With regard to these barriers, the commission stated that while leadership cannot make society blind to culture, gender, or color, it can demand and enforce merit-based practices and behavior within a company. The commission believed that these actions alone would substantially diminish the power of stereotyping.

The commission cited three governmental barriers to women's upward mobility. In addition to weaknesses in the collection and disaggregation of employment-related data, the commission found a lack of vigorous and consistent monitoring for compliance with affirmative action programs. The commission concluded that when enforcement is weak, such programs have a less positive effect on minority and female employment.

Recruitment and outreach barriers are significant barriers for women and minorities in reaching senior levels of management. Most companies promote from within. Therefore, businesses that are not actively recruiting and adding more women into their ranks will have a smaller pool from which to draw for promotion into upper management ranks. And once women do overcome the recruitment barrier, they are often stymied by what the commission called corporate climate barriers, such as differing gender communication styles, behaviors, and ways of socializing.

In addition, a host of career pipeline barriers impede the progress of women to the top. Among these are a lack of mentoring, initial placement in dead-end jobs, different standards for performance evaluation for women and men, and little or no access to informal networks of communication.

Organisations usually face problems with the gender discrimination in which men and women are only differentiated in accordance with their sexuality, irrespective of their talent and ability to work. This passage will discuss regarding the male dominance system in an organisations and neglect ion of women from selection of job to following the orders. This is a part of one of the barriers to change. Sometimes people make an opinion about other people regarding their gender only, this make organisation really difficult to take business further. By the point of view of Schein (1975), Harris (1995) and Aronson (1994) male dominance can be explained by selectors who are looking for candidates who are similar to themselves. As they classify other men as ‘in-group’ and women as ‘out-group’, only members of the first are favoured and promoted. As personnel managers tend to value women less than men, women are often denied important tasks and hindered in promotion. Consequently, they find no entrance to power networks – and sometimes do not even want to, as their need for power and their interest in responsibility and influence are much lower than among men (Wilson, 1995). Nicholson (1996) believes men feel more comfortable under the same sex managers, where as the opposite sex orders hurts their ego and disturbs their working capability. Adding to his point Bill Gregory (2003) says there is a need for specific models for the males to accept the females as per their designation. Which can help more women to enter into business for making ability based system.

1. As Gherardi (1995) states that organizations, despite their claim to be neuter and neutral, are structured according to the symbolism of gender. Still their culture is gendered. Hicks believes 1950’s was the era when top level managerial jobs were performed by the men, but now the condition is changing and everyone should adjust with it. Ruth Simpson (1995) with the help of statistical data in his article says, it is not surprising that studies continue to show women managers, particularly at higher levels, encountering problems and restrictions that relate almost entirely to their gender. According to Maddock and Parkin (1994) tactics such as, include sexual innuendo and conversations dominated by sport, serve to reinforce the prevailing values of the predominantly white male culture and to confirm their more powerful position.