(Illustration by iStock/Yusuf Saibani)
The sociopolitical landscape around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practice has shifted momentously in the past few years. Backlash threatens to fully upend efforts to address systemic inequities in our nation’s two largest social institutions—work and school. After recent executive orders and federal actions, leaders across industries and sectors are asking how to continue DEI work, or if it’s even possible.
In this moment of uncertainty, leaders have a chance to move DEI work forward by refocusing on organizational justice. First developed in the late 1980s and 1990s and later shaped with an eye toward application, organizational justice is a framework that focuses on fair treatment through equitable structures, policies, and processes. In the context of DEI, this approach recognizes that while organizational justice and social justice share core values, they differ in both scope and strategy. Efforts grounded in organizational justice can and usually should account for broader societal inequities, but their main goal is to ensure fairness within the organization itself. Because of that, tactics that drive social change in public or activist spaces don’t always work the same way inside institutions, and in some cases, they may even backfire.
Leaders and practitioners who understand the relationship between these two approaches and who address organizational injustice in ways that are context-specific, process-driven, and institutionally legitimate will be more successful and have stronger and more lasting impacts. They will also find it easier to navigate rising challenges to DEI work.
What Organizational Justice Demands
Different people in organizations will always get different things for various reasons, but the people in an organization must trust that the processes allocating opportunities and benefits are fundamentally fair and legitimate. An organizational justice approach therefore focuses on the fair and just treatment of all employees, emphasizing structures, policies, and processes over individual interventions. It also acknowledges that the formal and informal rules governing the allocation of resources will vary significantly between an investment bank, a municipality, and a local nonprofit.
In practice, the organizational justice approach is guided by three core elements:
- Identifying organizational inequality—the why and how people get different things in hiring, compensation, and advancement practices in specific organizational contexts. These inequalities, regardless of intention, are often correlated with historically marginalized groups, but the most pressing forms of inequality in any given organization may not be along these lines.
- Creating and executing organization-specific actions if the answers to why and how of inequality prove to be unjust or illegitimate.
- Capturing the operational and business benefits that follow from addressing organizational inequality.
An organizational justice approach also recognizes inequality along two dimensions. The first is the relationship between material and non-material resources. Material resources include money and the goods it directly provides, such as food and shelter. Non-material resources include fundamental rights, such as being treated with dignity and respect. Recent DEI efforts have tended to focus on the latter, but not necessarily in relation to material inequality. Efforts to support inclusion and belonging are not important merely because they can lead to positive team outcomes like innovation, reduced turnover, and productivity. They are also important because failing to treat everyone with respect violates the most basic right in a society that prizes dignity and self-determination. All people need material resources that provide for themselves and the people who depend on them. At their best, inclusion and belonging efforts create the conditions for everyone to access material resources through work that is grounded in fairness and dignity.
The second dimension is the extent of inequality—the gap between who gets the most and who gets the least. This is what people tend to think about when they hear inequality. Any indication of CEOs earning hundreds of times more than the median worker speaks to this. Moving forward, the extent of economic inequality can and should be a focus of DEI work if we want to adequately understand how inequality impacts employee behavior, how to expand opportunity, and how to counter perceptions that DEI work is out of touch with most Americans.
Enacting an organization-specific strategy that addresses these dimensions creates challenges that are not addressable by a single approach or set of tools. For example, a longstanding concern of DEI work is that women, especially women of color, are less likely to hold leadership roles in major companies. This happens for many reasons, including historic job and occupational segregation, cultural norms around gender and work, and lack of support for family and caregiving responsibilities. Yet the reasons any particular woman advances to leadership in a particular company is a complex story of her specific interests and constraints against the background of these societal realities.
If she is not promoted because decision-makers do not fairly value her qualifications and contributions the same way they would a similar male candidate, that is an obvious injustice under any framework (and a potential legal violation). If they do not promote her because she has not invested as much in seeking advancement or developing her career, that might reflect a genuine decision about her own individual desires and a legitimate decision in organizational justice terms. Yet that same lack of self-promotion or career ambition may be due to a grudging resignation that the doors of opportunity are not fully open to her. Under the last scenario, organizational justice principles would encourage us to look beyond the specific question of the fairness of that one promotion decision to ask whether and how organizational policy and practice can and should evolve to expand opportunity while recognizing the limits of how much organizational policy can fully address social inequality.
How Organizational Justice Gets Done
This kind of shift—from individual moments to systemic understanding—requires a deliberate and strategic approach. Recognizing unjust inequality is only the beginning; addressing it demands context-specific strategies and a willingness to adapt practices to the realities and needs of each organization. Applying an organizational justice approach depends on leaders’ active engagement with and perspectives on two questions: Are the ways and extent to which people get different things legitimate in our organization? If not, how should we address these inequalities?
Because there will always be differences in experiences and outcomes at work, it is useful to consider what markers of legitimacy might look like. DEI programs can gain legitimacy when they help break down favoritism, isolation, subjectivity, and secrecy in the workplace and refocus workplace practices and culture toward more just distributions of opportunities and benefits. This often includes transparent criteria and a culture that supports the success of all. It frequently means basing decisions more strongly on skills, qualifications, and business needs—recognizing that none of these have a universal meaning. Some people will still get hired or promoted over others, and some teams will be more successful than others, but those outcomes can be understood as more just than they were before.
While leaders have the ability and obligation to drive this change, those with less formal power can also have influence. Anyone can use organizational justice principles in their engagement at the individual, team, and organizational levels to make DEI efforts more meaningful and effective. We suggest beginning with four principles:
1. Reject ideological dogma. Fundamentally, there is no universal right answer to what DEI work is and how it should be executed. Legal rules against discrimination are the outer bounds of what is fair and legitimate, which is then further defined by organizational norms and values.
Strict dogmatic insistence on a single set of words, definitions, or practices—regardless of needs or context—is not only counterproductive; it is antithetical to the principle of inclusivity. There are multiple approaches to DEI, and DEI work should open doors and open minds, not restrict ideas or approaches. Effective and sustainable work is grounded in good faith and reasonable differences of opinion about the best way to increase justice in organizations.
An organizational justice lens favors actively customizing approaches to context, considering industry, geography, mission, and stakeholder communities, and practicing flexibility, responsiveness, and adaptation. Inflexible mandates drive leaders and workers to resist DEI, while alignment with organizational goals and needs drives leaders and workers to sustain it.
2. Aim for organizational success. DEI efforts are more effective as a means than as an end. Concepts and actions commonly associated with DEI like belonging, employee engagement, organizational climate, and psychological safety, should be treated as inputs and intermediate outcomes rather than final outcomes or measures of DEI success.
That being said, impact should not be discussed exclusively in bottom-line terms, such as revenue and profit. Instead, it should be measured by context-specific operational success, such as increased productivity and efficiency at the team and organizational levels. The responsibility for translating intermediate outcomes into organizational-level inputs and bottom-line success should be shared across organizational leadership.
3. The work is for everyone, and everyone’s needs are not the same. The targeted universalism approach posits that the most successful social change strategies for pluralistic societies employ a dual framework. They seek to achieve universal goals while recognizing the need to target strategies for reaching those goals, which reflect the needs and contexts of different communities. Similarly, taking an organizational justice lens recognizes that every person in an organization is entitled to organizational justice and that work to address inequality should benefit and protect everyone.
At the same time, DEI work must account for the fact that organizational practices may not benefit and protect everyone equally. Analyses and strategies focused on demographic identity are important but may be insufficient frameworks for programs and initiatives. The specific constellations of identity categories that should be given explicit attention in any organization will vary, keeping in mind the organization’s external environment, competitive pressures, and associated business goals and strategies.
4. Let strategy lead and learning follow. Learning and development programming should be part of this work but should come downstream from proactive strategic planning. Much of the critical public discourse around DEI refers to the general inefficacy of diversity training, but an organizational justice lens does not treat training as a goal in itself. Rather, legal risk mitigation or reactive measures should be deprioritized in favor of tailored and strategically aligned learning and development programs.
Generic, off-the-shelf materials are ineffective except as introductory resources for those with little to no prior exposure to relevant issues. Even in such cases, they should serve as invitations to learn and engage rather than mandatory compliance exercises. Compulsory training can have negative effects, and it often sends the message (intentional or not) that DEI requires a single belief system.
Further, avoid making assumptions about anyone’s individual needs or experiences based on their group membership. While people of color and women face systemic barriers, these patterns of inequality do not automatically translate in every organization and certainly not for every person. Similarly, while there is evidence that Black employees, on average, experience more structural and cultural barriers to workplace well-being than their peers, it does not follow that every Black person in every organization experiences less well-being than others. Training or programs that explicitly or implicitly assume this do a disservice to the very people DEI efforts are meant to support.
A Moment for Opportunity and Evolution
Doing nothing to advance equality within organizations is a considerable risk for organizations. Ignorance of the ways that inequality shows up can both harm individuals and ultimately result in negative customer response, losing out on talent, poor decisions, and legal liability. Where organizational equality strategies address the root causes of these risks, the market will reward those who pursue them. Over the medium- to long-term, we will see whether DEI backlash and retreat can compete with expanding opportunities for workers and for business.
At this critical juncture, DEI work must evolve—not to appease opposition but to remain effective and enduring. An organizational justice lens offers a pragmatic path forward: one that embraces complexity, responds to context, and focuses on building fairer systems. The question is not whether to rename or rehouse DEI but whether we will do the real work of eliminating unjust inequality in ways that are strategic, legitimate, and aligned with purpose. In doing so, we will protect decades of progress and lay the groundwork for a more just future.
Read more stories by Ahmmad Brown & Pamela Coukos.