Ask Ethical Questions as the Lines Blur Between AI and Media

Media Magnify Scandals of Big-Name Companies

By Daniel Butcher

Companies that dominate their industries also have to deal with increased scrutiny. Any negative news, from layoffs and unethical conduct to data breaches, get amplified and can easily become scandals, according to Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Media attention is drawn by the accused or guilty party’s prestige, he said.

“If the perpetrator is high-reputation, they may get the benefit of the doubt for less severe misconduct as some kind of one-off thing, and the media may be less likely to cover it,” Pollock said. “But if the misconduct is severe, then the media is even more likely to scandalize the high-reputation firm’s misconduct, because we don’t expect that from high-reputation firms; it violates our expectations.

“When we have high expectations about a firm’s behavior, whether because we expect them to be more competent or act with more integrity, it’s a bigger deal and more disturbing when they violate that expectation,” he said. “That makes the incident more newsworthy to the media, increasing their coverage of the misconduct.

“These are sorts of things that we’re looking at and trying to understand: What are misconduct aspects and firm characteristics lead the misconduct to become a scandal?”

Pollock and colleagues compared the reactions to data breaches at two different companies of vastly different levels of prestige and name recognition: Facebook and Chegg, a U.S. education technology company that provides homework help, textbooks, online tutoring, and other student services.

“Facebook had a data breach of 50 million accounts; it was covered widely in the media and got lots of attention—thousands of articles were written about their data breach and the problems with it,” Pollock said. “And literally on the same day, Chegg, which is an academic software company, had a similar data breach—40 million accounts were breached, but it was barely covered outside of the the specialist media on data security, and a little bit in the in the education sector.

“So why Facebook and not Chegg? Facebook is better known,” he said. “More people use Facebook and have given them their data, so the expectancy violation is greater and possibly more personal.

“Journalists recognize this, and thus are more likely to scandalize the incident, because it attracts more readers.”

Reactions to CEO’s Killing Illustrate U.S. Health Insurers’ Bad Rep

By Daniel Butcher

The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York in December 2024 exposed Americans’ intense frustration and deep-seated anger at the U.S. healthcare system. They’re forced to pay more and more for health insurance every year, while dealing with administrative burdens and denials of doctor-recommended procedures, medications, and other medical services.

Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville said that people’s reactions to Thompson’s killing point to the horrible reputation that the U.S. health insurance industry has with the general public.

“Almost anyone in the U.S. you talk to about health insurance has complaints—I’m sure you could probably recount your own healthcare or health insurance war story, when something got declined, or you had problems getting treatment or getting [a procedure or medication] paid for,” Pollock said. “It happens to everybody in the U.S., and in some cases it can be pretty devastating, resulting in bankruptcy and losing all your assets when you have to absorb the costs when coverage is denied for a medical emergency or an expensive medical treatment.

“So there’s a lot of anger around how our healthcare system has been working or failing to work for for people, and it creates this pent-up anger in the [American] populace,” he said. “And so, aside from leading one person who was clearly having additional issues to go out and kill the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, you see the public respond by putting up these social-media posts, like ‘Request for thoughts and prayers denied’ and ‘You failed to get prior approval for having an object removed from your chest, so therefore, it will not be covered’—that kind of stuff, and making the shooter almost a folk hero in certain quarters.

“These kinds of posts that people are putting out there and many others cheering them on speaks to the anger that folks have.”

Merriam-Webster defines infamy as an “evil reputation brought about by something grossly criminal, shocking, or brutal.” Some health insurance leaders have looked themselves in the mirror and wondered what they could do differently, while others have denied responsibility for people’s suffering, both physical and financial.

“We talk about celebrity a lot, which is tied to people’s positive emotional reactions,” Pollock said. “But there’s another kind of emotional reaction called infamy, which is a bad reputation associated with people’s negative emotional reactions that are highly visible.

“A lot of these industries have become infamous, and as the face of the companies, the CEOs will take the brunt of people’s ire.”

Why You Should Be Kind to Medical Staff

By Daniel Butcher

While many people worldwide experience frustration with their healthcare system, taking it out on individual healthcare workers can backfire. Rudeness toward medical staff can lead to more delays and even errors.

Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University said that being rude to doctors, nurses, and other medical staff can hurt their job performance because it consumes valuable cognitive resources. In short, rudeness creates a huge mental distraction.

“Our theory was that when you experience rudeness, you’re distracted because of it, and you’re not even aware that you’re distracted. But you are distracted, and as a result, you can’t pick up on a lot of the social signals that are being communicated by other people, and interactions with bosses, team members, and clients or patients are harmed by that,” Bamberger said. “We actually demonstrated that in a field experiment using medical simulations; we brought in doctors to a medical simulation center where they were working on mannequins.

“Simulation centers are increasingly used to train doctors; they have all the equipment there: They can intubate, they can see X-rays, they kind diagnose and treat maladies,” he said. “So we look at the way they interact with each other; how do they try and transmit information to each other? How do they share tasks?”

Bamberger and colleagues recorded the medical team processes while working at the medical simulation center.

“We look at their diagnostic performance, their treatment performance, and their general patient management in an intensive-care context,” Bamberger said. “First of all, what we find is that individuals who are experiencing rudeness have significantly poorer performance than those who don’t.

“It’s interesting that this rudeness experience at the start of the day has lingering effects throughout the day; it doesn’t just go away after an hour or two,” he said. “The poor diagnostic and treatment performance stays on throughout each of the scenarios that they have to deal with over the course of the day, even after lunch, so they just come in at eight in the morning, they finish at four in the afternoon, and this stuff—being distracted by bosses’ or patients’ rude behavior while they are unconsciously trying to assess any possible threat—goes on all through the afternoon.

“The differences in staff performance pre- and post-rudeness are clear.”

Why One-Size-Fits-All Diversity Training Fails to Deliver

By Daniel Butcher

The more customized and personalized in-office training sessions are, the more effective they tend to be, and that’s especially true for diversity training, according to Academy of Management Scholar Quinetta Roberson of Michigan State University.

“We’ve all had different experiences; we all have different backgrounds,” she said. “Taking that into consideration, our starting point might be different in terms of the things we need to learn in training—somebody might need it to be more knowledge-based, whereas maybe another person is more emotion-oriented and needs to learn how not to be so reactive.

“Organizational leaders might say, ‘This sounds like a hell of a lot to customize—we have a 10,000-person organization, so how can we customize diversity training for each individual employee?’ but it’s mainly about designing for a wide range of people with different frames of reference and learning styles to improve the return on your training investment,” Roberson said. “A lot of companies buy training off the shelf, and they say, ‘This person, this competitor, or this company in our industry uses this consultant or this diversity-training program.’

“I guess it works for some of them, because they’ve been using it for years, but that doesn’t mean that it’s tailored to address your people and your culture.”

The big-picture takeaway that Roberson stressed is the important of developing flexible, customizable diversity-training models—or working directly with people who do develop diversity training and learning in a way that suits the organization’s purposes.
“Diversity training should not be a plug-and-play one-size-fits-all approach and just hoping that it’ll address all of the organization’s issues,” Roberson said.

“If leaders are spending this money, and if the organization’s people are spending time in this training, then they want to ensure that they’re getting bang for their buck—some return on their investment—and that is going to be something that’s useful and tailored to their people and their culture,” she said.

Connect the Dots from Training to Learning

By Daniel Butcher

Employee training is most effective when leaders and trainers integrate and reinforce learning objectives and key concepts throughout sessions and encourage participants to apply the new knowledge in their roles.

Academy of Management Scholar Quinetta Roberson of Michigan State University said that pre- and post-training elements are just as important as the training session itself.

“We talk about letting people set their own goals like, ‘This is what I want to get out of the training’ or ‘This is how I want to progress through it,’ because that’s part of that act of learning and being personally responsible in the training,” Roberson said.“In the post-training environment, what happens a lot is that people who were in diversity training are excited—‘I learned this, and I met some cool people,’ etc.

“But the manager says, ‘I need you to do XYZ; get back to work—I missed you for this time you were gone,’ and so work piles up and they’re expected to jump right back into work and so don’t have an opportunity to apply what they’ve learned,” she said.
“So having managers or leaders who actually work with their employees to set goals for how they’re going to use their training in their job or building some of those into their performance evaluation help employees to feel that it’s not just something they went through that was a waste of time.”

Giving participants the opportunity to share and actually have responsibility for sharing, such as a train-the-trainer feedback forum and asking people to share what they’ve learned with colleagues and be subject-matter experts on something that was covered during the training session is a best practice, Roberson said.

“Those kinds of things at least make sure that what they learned in the training is not forgotten and tossed to the side but rather it’s actually pulled into their work,” she said. “And it helps the employees make the connection between what they learned in the training and what they actually have to do in the work environment.”

Why Many Big Brands Reneged on Diversity Commitments

By Daniel Butcher

In November 2024, Walmart joined other major corporations such as automakers Toyota and Ford Motor Co. in scratching its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the face of threatened boycotts. Walmart announced that it had pulled out of The Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index, which gave priority treatment to suppliers based on racial or gender diversity, and ended support for a racial equity center established after a police officer killed George Floyd in 2020.

Those decisions come in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision ending affirmative action in college admissions, which has emboldened conservative groups to pressure companies to turn their backs on their DEI commitments. For example, Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s America First Legal group has sued companies with DEI initiatives and programs focused on helping Americans of diverse racial and ethnic groups.

Academy of Management Scholar Quinetta Roberson of Michigan State University recalled that she was confused and saddened when John Deere & Co., Tractor Supply Company, and other companies announced that they were scaling back their DEI initiatives in response to criticism and boycott threats from a conservative influencer.

“For those who recognize the value of DEI, it’s perplexing that a non-shareholder could wield such influence over corporate decision-making,” Roberson said. “However, this response reveals a deeper issue: The vulnerability of these firms’ DEI efforts suggests they were never a meaningful part of their mission or strategy.

“Instead, these initiatives were likely performative and transactional, lacking true integration into the companies’ business strategy and operations,” she said. “Unsurprisingly, such superficial approaches to attracting, engaging, and retaining key talent leaves companies exposed to both vulnerability and scrutiny.”

Why the Meanings of DEI, CRT, and Woke Have Been Warped

By Daniel Butcher

As the political pendulum swings, ideas and policies that were once uncontested and niche become controversial and mainstream. Often, terms used to define academic discourse are redefined by politicians and pundits.

For example, Academy of Management Scholar Quinetta Roberson of Michigan State University said that terms such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), critical race theory (CRT), and woke have been removed from their original context and weaponized to support people’s political ideologies.

“When people use terminology like woke [in a disparaging sense], you’ve already told me everything I need to know, because it is not a scholarly construct—it is not its intended meaning; they’re using it in a different way,” Roberson said. “They’ve removed its context and significance and politicized it.

“Also, people are equating woke strategies with DEI, and if you unpack that, their conceptualization of DEI becomes primarily about race and maybe a little bit about LGBTQ, but it’s race and ethnicity primarily,” she said. “You don’t hear about it when people are talking about gender, veteran status, or all of the things that are protected categories like disability.

“It becomes this dog whistle for why the speaker doesn’t like certain things about how race is discussed.”

Opinions differ on why that is the case. But repurposing language has long history among political movements. Sometimes, it’s simply a way to deflect uncomfortable topics of conversation or debate.

“There are some people who consider words like equity to mean that some people get a bigger slice of a fixed pie—some people are going to get ahead and some people are not,” Roberson said. “If they think about diversity training, in their mind, that means that some people are going to be made to feel bad about how others have been treated unfairly.

“It’s this conflict-management strategy, where they say, ‘Let’s not talk about it at all—some people had it bad years ago, but we are a post-racial society,’” she said.

“If people use certain terminology, I already know where they sit, and am less likely to engage in a debate with them, because I know that they’re going on opinion or rhetoric rather than on evidence.”

Diversity Trainees Need a Mindset Shift to Learn and Change

By Daniel Butcher

A key to effective diversity training is to inspire a shift in trainees’ mindset so that they’re willing to engage with the material and discuss it with fellow participants, then—crucially—apply what they’ve learned by putting into practice in the workplace.

Academy of Management Scholar Quinetta Roberson of Michigan State University said that she and colleagues have thought a lot about what they can do to create a new model for diversity training.

“We asked ourselves, ‘How can we do this in a way that people can actually use it?’ and so we thought about some individual or trainee personas so that participants experience what has happened in organizations and how to address those situations,” Roberson said. “You have somebody who is apprehensive and is thinking, ‘I don’t want to go through this; I don’t want to engage because I don’t want anybody yelling at me’—maybe they’re conflict-averse, and they just don’t want to be part of that sensitive conversation.

“At same time, you have trainees who are very zealous, somebody who thinks, ‘I know everything, and I could basically teach this training myself,’ and their motivation and learning is also stifled because they’re already thinking, ‘I got this’—they don’t necessarily feel like there’s anything for them to learn,” she said. “So we wanted to create this diversity-training model that’s applicable to everybody.

“Regardless of whether somebody is resistant or 100% gung-ho, how do you get that person engaged? How do you get them to into the proper mindset for the training and wanting to learn and engage and, most importantly, use it once they get back into the work environment?”

Diversity Words vs. Action

By Daniel Butcher

Plenty of leaders talk the talk about their belief in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), but fewer actually walk the walk by setting specific objectives and investing sufficient resources to make significant improvements.

Academy of Management Scholar Quinetta Roberson of Michigan State University said that for organizations to truly earn the boost to their reputation that investing in a DEI program is likely to deliver, they must demonstrate a commitment, beyond just issuing press releases or making public statements.

“You often find that there are organizations that will express a commitment to DEI; you’re rarely going to find an organization that says, ‘We hate DEI; we’re not going to anything related to DEI; it doesn’t make sense for our organization,’ although you will have organizations do so on occasion,” Roberson said.

For example, in June 2024, Tractor Supply Company issued a statement that the organization will “no longer submit data to the Human Rights Campaign…stop sponsoring nonbusiness activities like pride festivals and voting campaigns, eliminate DEI roles and retire our current DEI goals while still ensuring a respectful environment, and withdraw our carbon emission goals and focus on our land and water conservation efforts.”

Why?

Tractor Supply Company pointed to customer feedback.

“In a way, they’re saying that those issues are not important to them anymore, so they’ve decided what they think is important to their customer base and their other stakeholders,” Roberson said. “But a lot of times you find organizations [whose leaders] hear about DEI and say, ‘We should probably do it,’ but they have limited knowledge of what that means for their part of the business and they don’t really give it deep thought about how to do it.

“They also don’t think about the demonstration of commitment to DEI; they just say things like, ‘We believe in an equitable workplace, and we believe in an inclusive workplace,’ but then when it comes time to do it, they go and look to see what everybody else is doing,” she said. “And there’s this normative effect, where they say, ‘We probably should have diversity training, employee resource groups, and some kind of outreach,’ but they pick and choose from the menu of diversity practices without thinking about what the end state is and what they want their DEI program to look like.

“And it’s perfectly fine for an organization to say, ‘We’re not really trying to change things; we just want to look good,’ because having a good reputation is an outcome that can be a driver of organizational action, but they also have to realize that if that’s all they’re doing and if people are unhappy or disengaged and they leave, or they’re having trouble recruiting, they shouldn’t be surprised, because they’re literally just expressing a commitment to DEI; they’re not demonstrating a commitment to it or trying to change their environment in any way.”

A Check-the-Box Approach Diminishes Diversity Training’s Value

By Daniel Butcher

Most large organizations have diversity training for employees, but only a few actually have diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) objectives. Far too many organizations think of DEI as a check-the-box compliance exercise rather than a way to boost employee performance and well-being. But organizations that prioritize DEI reap benefits, according to Academy of Management Scholar Quinetta Roberson of Michigan State University.

Roberson acknowledged that there is little quantitative data to support the effectiveness of diversity training in organizations. A notable exception, however, is McKinsey’s 2023 “Diversity Matters Even More” report, which found a “39% increased likelihood of outperformance for those in the top quartile of ethnic and gender representation versus the bottom quartile.” In addition, McKinsey found that the performance of companies lacking diverse representation is likely to be 30% lower on average than their more diverse competitors.

“Part of the problem is that a lot of DEI training is implemented and used from a compliance perspective, so if there are any problems, leaders send people to do diversity training, so it gets rid of the vulnerability for the organization, rather than thinking about what diversity training was originally designed for and intended to be,” Roberson said. “It’s to change attitudes and behavior.

“People’s attitude to DEI is very sticky, because by the time they go through diversity trading at work, they’re who they’re going to become as people—they’re like adults, fully formed individuals,” she said. “So saying that you’re going to change their attitudes is a tall order for something that may be two hours or four hours a day at the most.

“Research on active learning says, in order for training to be effective, people have to be involved and engaged in their own learning process—I can’t come to you and say, ‘You’re going to take X, Y, and Z,’ but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be engaged in it or motivated to learn.”