Celebrating Corporate History Can Backfire
A company that plugs its past can alienate those who were previously marginalized.
- By
- July 01, 2024
- CBR - Behavioral Science
Wells Fargo launched in 1852 during the California gold rush, and nearly 175 years later, the now-international financial-services company still celebrates its beginnings. At the bank’s museum in San Francisco, visitors can see original stagecoaches, gold nuggets, and other artifacts. Its website shows photos of founders Henry Wells and William G. Fargo and describes how they “built an innovative start-up to help customers build businesses and manage money in a rapidly changing world.”
Many companies and other organizations, from religious institutions to universities, celebrate their history in this way. It can be a means of engaging with potential employees, as well as customers and others. But research points to some risk in this type of celebration. Black Americans may experience an organization’s celebration of its history as marginalizing and even threatening, find Chicago Booth postdoctoral scholar Laura E. Wallace, WGU Labs’ Stephanie L. Reeves, and Ohio State’s Steven J. Spencer, who write that the reaction is related to the fraught racial history of the United States.
Focusing on the workplace, the researchers explored the idea of a social-identity threat, the fear that a person might be devalued or excluded on the basis of her group. “Members of marginalized groups are often hypervigilant for environmental cues that they will be treated differently based on their group membership,” the researchers write.
Could old photographs be interpreted as such a cue? The researchers performed an online experiment in which Black American participants evaluated the website of a fictional consulting company, rating on a 5-point scale whether they felt it would value them as employees and indicating how likely they would be to apply for a job there. All of the participants viewed the company’s About page, which showed a black-and-white photograph of four white male founders, alongside a caption stating that it had been taken in 1951 in Charleston, South Carolina.
“We expected that participants would interpret the photo of the all-White founders and the information that the company was founded in the South during the Civil Rights Era as an indication that Black Americans were historically marginalized in the company,” the researchers write.
Half the participants were shown a version of the page in which the company celebrated its history, while the other half viewed a version where history wasn’t discussed beyond the photograph. As the researchers predicted, participants who read the company’s history said they anticipated feeling less of a sense of belonging in the organization and reported less of an intention to apply for a job there, compared with those who didn’t read the history. In a space that the researchers allocated for participants to share open-ended reactions, one wrote, “It’s the focus on the words ‘history,’ ‘tradition,’ and ‘old fashioned values’ that set me on edge. Just like the phrase, ‘Make America great again,’ it’s code for, ‘put certain people back into their rightful inferior place.”
The long shadow of racism
When Black American study participants viewed a fictitious corporate website that celebrated its history, they were less likely than others in a control group to report anticipating a sense of belonging in the company as employees and indeed were less interested in pursuing employment with the company.
In another experiment, the researchers wanted to see whether a description of a company’s history would have the same effect if accompanied by fewer additional cues. This time, Black participants learned from a fictional corporate description about the original 100-year-old grocery store founded in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but the “About” page omitted a photo of the ostensible founders.
Even without the photo, participants who read about the company’s history anticipated less of a sense of belonging in the organization and expressed less intention to pursue employment. And, in another experiment, it was true even when mention of the company’s Southern founding location was removed but a photo was displayed.
The researchers write that sharing history appears to be enough to trigger a social identity threat. “Given the broader historical context of pervasive racism,” write Wallace, Reeves, and Spencer, “even with no suggestion that this particular organization had a history of discrimination, Black participants were concerned about fair treatment in the present.”
In a final experiment, the researchers wanted to see what would happen if participants learned that a company’s history included Black leadership—and it made a difference. Participants who were told that Black leaders had been part of the company’s past, compared with those who weren’t told so, felt more of a sense of belonging and reported greater intention to apply for employment.
That’s good news, except that few organizations in the US actually have had Black leadership, the researchers note. They suggest that companies trying to be more inclusive may want to present other information such as the current proportion of Black staff members and the company’s philosophy around diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“These cues could actually be more diagnostic of how one’s group is likely treated in the organization,” they write. “For example, a large number of Black people in an organization in the present might be a signal that Black people tend to be treated well and have influence in the organization.” History, then, might be less powerful than describing what’s going on in the present.
Laura E. Wallace, Stephanie L. Reeves, and Steven J. Spencer, “Celebrating Organizational History Triggers Social Identity Threat among Black Americans,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 2024.
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