Accounting for Time: Comparing Temporal and Atemporal Analyses of the Business Case for Diversity Management

Abstract

Public management strategies have an inherent temporal component: managers take action at one time, and employees or organizations respond at a later time. However, it is common to study such strategies using atemporal research. Concerns about the inadequacy of this approach have led scholars to advocate for public management research that incorporates time. Because following this advice is difficult, it is important to evaluate how the omission of time affects the understanding of public management strategies. This article compares temporal and atemporal analyses of the business case for diversity management—the expectation that organizations that manage diversity well will also improve their performance. Using survey and personnel data drawn from U.S. federal government subagencies, the article shows that both analyses support this general expectation. However, the cross‐sectional analysis, by failing to account for organizational inertia, portrays diversity management as more potent than the analyses taking time into account.

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