• Quinetta M Roberson and Cynthia Kay Stevens.
• Human Resource Studies, School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. qmr3@cornell.edu
• J Appl Psychol. 2006 Mar 1; 91 (2): 379-91.

AbstractTo discern patterns of employee sense-making about workplace diversity, the authors analyzed 751 natural language accounts of diversity incidents from 712 workers in one department of a large organization. Six generic incident types emerged: discrimination, representation, treatment by management, work relationships, respect between groups, and diversity climates. Consistent with hypotheses, incidents that respondents viewed as negative, accounts from women, and those involving members of respondents' in-groups were more likely to cite justice issues. Partially consistent with research on the linguistic intergroup bias, both negative and positive accounts involving out-group members and accounts from men were more likely to be expressed using abstract verb forms. The authors discuss future opportunities to integrate research on diversity, justice, and the linguistic category model.

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