Creating Diverse and Religiously Inclusive Workplace Cultures in Hyper-Connected, Technical, and Cyber-Driven Organizations

Introduction

The global cybersecurity workforce will have more than 1.5 million unfilled positions in 2020. To meet these increasing gap, organizations are considering employees from different backgrounds, experiences, and career trajectories (Burrell & Nobles, 2018). There are no one-size-fits-all guidelines for talent management, and different organizations deploy various strategies for effective talent management (Sivathanu, & Pillai, 2019). Meeting the demand includes recruiting, and talent management approaches that can source job candidates from different countries and cultures. Collaborative activities have become an essential consideration of contemporary workspace design as job functions become more virtual and technology-driven to include more cross-functional involvement on teams (Lauren, 2015). As a result, healthy and collaborative workplace cultures will continue to be those that become inclusive, religiously, and culturally diverse. This talent management shift necessitates new skills for managers and further training for all employees (Sivathanu, & Pillai, 2019). The U.S. workplace religious incivility and discrimination are often driven by a lack of understanding, and intolerance in ways can devalue those of minority faiths like Seventh-day Adventists, Jews, and Sikhs (Moodie, 2016).

Several public incidents highlight how conflict around religion has created a breeding ground for incivility, profiling, hate, and devaluing others that can bleed into the workplace, especially technical organizations looking to bring new groups of employees to the workplace that have existed in small quantities. A 2016 United States presidential proposal to bar foreign Muslims from entering the country has had a polarizing impact on those who are Muslim American citizens. According to Pew Research (2019), the share of Americans saying Jews face discrimination in the U.S. has increased substantially since late 2016 to the level that 64% of Americans say Jews face discrimination. Survey results from 2019 have increased a 20-percentage-point increase from 2016 (Pew, 2019). Muslims, in particular, are facing more discrimination than other groups in society; 82% say Muslims face some discrimination, with 56% saying they encounter a lot of discrimination (Pew, 2019).

An August 2017 protest in Charlottesville, VA, USA, included marginalizing chants of “Jews will not replace us.” The year 2017 represented the most significant one-year increase of anti-Semitic incidents in U.S. history (Heim, 2017). Regardless of one’s political affinity or religion, public debates and confrontations can have rippling effects beyond political discourse. These debates can represent employee beliefs related to religion, which can lead to disagreements. These disagreements can manifest themselves in dehumanizing encounters in the workplace that hamper workplace productivity, employee commitment, and the accomplishment of organizational goals (Burrell et al., 2009; Burrell, 2015).

The research objective of this paper is to provide on contextual review of the literature and current events to provide conceptual and practical solutions to how technical organizations and cybersecurity operations can proactively solve employee conflict and workplace incivility around religion.

The research methods include exploration of the significant literature around the areas of organizational development, conflict management, interfaith action, and conflict management to understand better the impacts on individuals and the organization concerning religious incivility. The paper uses a relational content analysis of the literature as the research approach aimed to determine the presence and relationships of common themes and concepts. The approach used was outlined by Krippendorff (1980) who asserts that concepts are “ideational grains;” these grains can be thought of as emblems which develop connotation through their connections to other emblems.

The research results indicate a need for managerial awareness and organizational focus around the impact of religious intolerance and religious diversity in technical workplaces, especially as the U.S. becomes more diverse and focuses on the recruitment of cybersecurity talent from other countries, cultures, origins, and ethnicities to meet the workforce shortages. Many of these workers have the potential to be non-Christians.