Research
Job-Market Paper
When Conflict Does Not Kill Practice: Contested Survival of D&I Programs Amidst Institutional Complexity
Working paper (solo-authored). Presenting at the Academy of Management annual meeting, Philadelphia, August 2026; targeting Administrative Science Quarterly.
Scholars and managers alike expect a contested practice to endure only when it fits the organization’s dominant doctrine. Across a nine-year comparative study of four technology firms, I find the opposite. Identity-conscious diversity programs, out of step with their firms’ identity-neutral doctrine, outlived the aligned programs beside them. Conflict is what recruited the programs’ defenders: employee activists volunteered labor that formal structures would not fund, and senior executives spent their own budgets and standing to sponsor them. Those coalitions achieved what I call structural nesting — relocating a contested practice into a well-resourced part of the organization, where it survived leadership turnover, budget cuts, and the cooling of public enthusiasm. The aligned programs, defended by nothing but a business case, were quietly wound down when conditions turned.
Draft available on request.
Publications
Preston, M. C., Boyd, T. L., Leigh, A., Burgess, R., & Marsh, V. L. 2024. “An ally by any other name: Examining the effects of racial minority leaders as allies for advancing racial justice.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 181: 104321. doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2024.104321
Across three experiments, we find that racial minority leaders who advocate for their own racial group are viewed as showing ingroup favoritism — dimming their perceived effectiveness as allies and as leaders — but a simple shift in framing, publicly amplifying the voices of lower-level employees, reduces that penalty.
Under Review
Leigh, A., Nwadei, T., White, M., Lattimore, B., & Marsh, V. L. “A threat is in the news: The cross-group effects of race-based mega-threats on members of different racially stigmatized groups.” Revise & resubmit (first round), Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Working Papers
Marsh, V. L., Das, S., Delavallade, C., Rouanet, L., & Koroknay-Palicz, T. “Assessing both agentic and communal workplace social, emotional, and behavioral skills in Africa: The ESTEEM framework.” Preprint available.
Social and emotional skills predict workplace outcomes, but the instruments that measure them were built for single countries and student samples. The ESTEEM framework measures both agentic and communal workplace skills, validated in African labor-market contexts.
Reports & Frameworks
Marsh, V., Delavallade, C., Das, S., Rouanet, L. M., Koroknay-Palicz, T., & McDaniel, D. 2025. “Assessing Workplace Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Skills in Africa: The ESTEEM Framework.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 11128. World Bank Open Knowledge PDF
In Preparation
Marsh, V. L., Crawley, R., & Hekman, D. R. “Employee attributions of stated and lived organizational commitment to CSR and DEI: Rhetoric, program design, and effort.”
Employees judge a program less by how leaders talk about it than by how it is built. We test whether design signals — a program tailored to a firm’s own needs, or championed by a line executive rather than parked in the office required to run it — predict employee effort better than leadership rhetoric. Design is the message.
Dissertation
Employee Perceptions of Workplace Practices: Turnkey versus Tailored Diversity Programs (University of Colorado Boulder, 2021)
A study of innovation in diversity practices among Silicon Valley technology firms, including a longitudinal analysis of how a DEI mentorship program sustained itself through an economic downturn — the empirical seed of my current research agenda.