Beyond Window Dressing: Organizational Diversity Rationales Impact Anti-DEI Claims-Making through Applicant Self-Selection

Organizations encouraging applications from a “diverse set of candidates” during hiring may offer different justifications for why diversity matters. For example, instrumental rationales justify attention to diversity because it improves organizational performance and broadly benefits everyone, while moral rationales instead invoke principles like fairness and equity. These rationales act as signals that might not only shape dominant group members’ application behavior, but also facilitate self-selection according to candidates’ diversity-related attitudes. This paper implements a multi-phase, pre-registered experiment on an online gig work platform to examine how diversity rationales shape White workers’ interest in applying for a job and how they evaluate diversity-related claims after being hired. Results show that moral rationales for diversity were more likely to deter prospective White applicants from applying. Condition effects also emerged in how participants spontaneously expressed their racial identities in their applications. Among a random sample of applicants from each condition later hired to complete the job, those who applied under the moral rationale were less likely to legitimize complaints about anti-racist diversity initiatives when the complaints appealed to a shared social identity. The findings suggest that even if, as often believed, organizational rhetoric about diversity is merely symbolic, it could attract different types of members who work to realize the differences among those stated commitments.