Here’s a paradox: the moment an organization promotes a highly visible minority “star” employee, its diversity efforts may actually slow down. Instead of opening the door wider for further diversity efforts, leaders may feel, consciously or not, that they’ve already “done enough.”
That counterintuitive dynamic is at the heart of a new study, published in Organization Science, by Associate Professor of Management and Organizations Julia Hur and her coauthor Jun Lin, a current PhD student at Stanford University and a former research assistant in Hur’s lab. Their research shows that the status of a single minority employee can give organizations a false sense of progress, leading them to invest less in diversity efforts overall, including bringing in additional minority team members, even when their representation remains low.
To understand why, Hur and her team turned to an unusually transparent industry: Major League Baseball. “Baseball is one of the few professional settings where nearly everything about a player is publicly documented: awards, salaries, tenure, performance, media coverage, and annual roster changes,” Hur said. “This made it possible for us to measure two critical variables: how much status a minority player held, and how a team subsequently adjusted its hiring.”
The project required building an unusually complex dataset. Hur’s team scraped and compiled data from USA Today, Baseball Reference, ESPN, and Sports Illustrated, and calculated detailed measures of each player’s experience, performance, awards, and prominence. Research assistants in Hur’s GIM LAB supported this work by helping scrape data, code player information, and run many simple to complex calculations needed to ensure accuracy. “It sounds simple at first, but measuring something like status takes a huge amount of work,” said Hur. “Performance alone has many formulas, and status was measured in five different ways in our paper. It was an incredible effort just to compile it accurately. Our research assistants, most of them undergrads and master’s students, really did a great job.”
With the data assembled, an interesting pattern emerged: teams with high-status minority players were less likely to increase minority representation the next season compared with teams with low-status minority players. The trend held steady across different performance and team conditions.
The effect was even stronger when a star player from a racial minority group played a position typically associated with white players, such as pitcher. “When someone stands out even more than usual,” Hur explained, “they’re the first person leaders think of when they ask themselves, ‘How are we doing on diversity?’ And that one clear example can overshadow the bigger picture.”
To test whether this pattern extended beyond sports or beyond race, Hur and Lin ran a second study using a corporate board scenario, this time focusing on gender. The same effect appeared: when participants saw a high-status woman already on a corporate board, they were less motivated to bring in additional female candidates.
Hur noted that these findings challenge a common assumption about diversity in the workplace – that progress is simply a matter of increasing headcounts. “It’s not just about how many minority members you have,” she said. “It’s also about who they are, how visible they are, how memorable they are. Those individual attributes can really shape decision making.”
For organizations aiming for meaningful change, the message is clear: do not confuse visibility with progress. “If you care about diversity as an organizational goal, you need real metrics – not just the presence of one exceptional person,” said Hur. “Otherwise, that one person can unintentionally mask the work that still needs to be done.”