Alexandra Figueroa, Ph.D.

Alexandra

FIGUEROA, Ph.D.

I am a Postdoctoral Scholar in Racial Equity at University of California Berkeley, Haas School of Business. Currently, I study the inclusion of marginalized populations in organizations, and how such topics are influenced by individual and organization-level moral systems.

Upcoming Research Talks

October 11th, Virtual: Fostering Psychological Safety in the Workplace: Berkeley Haas Diversity Day Forum

Research Spotlight

Bluebloods: an Organizational Theory of Fictive Kinship as Ethical Sensemaking

Alexandra Figueroa, Jared Poole

Organizational fictive kinship metaphors (the use of family language between unrelated people in a workplace), a surprisingly undertheorized phenomenon given its ubiquity in working life. To create a nascent theory of fictive kinship in organizations, we qualitatively analyze over a thousand publicly available documents, blog posts, and discussion threads published in police magazines, blogs, and discussion forums (2002-2022). We find that fictive kinship language functions as a sensemaking mechanism to give meaning to the unethical behavior that officers frequently engage in this way, it can attenuate moral tensions associated with a profession. We discuss implications of these findings for 

Can Organizations be Allies?

Alexandra Figueroa, Sarah L. Jensen, Jesse Graham

This work examines organizational-level inclusion signals and their subsequent effects on employees. Answering the call for more research on concealable stigmatized identities, we consider the effect of such organization-level inclusion signals for sexual and gender minorities (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender employees) while also considering the effect on non-target employees. In a time-lagged observational study (N = 1,165 ), archival data (N = 229), and a randomized experiment (N = 380), we show that organizational-level inclusion efforts lead to more positive perception of the organization’s psychological climate for sexual and gender minorities, closing the psychological safety gap between non-LGBT and LGBT employees. Notably, these intentional inclusion efforts also benefit non-LGBT employees, which contradicts recent theoretical assertions that intentional inclusion can harm majority groups, or that organizational inclusion is a zero-sum game. In sum, we show that such signaling improves psychological safety for all employees, reducing or eliminating the deficit between target and non-target employees while also encouraging value-aligned positive behaviors. 

 

GALLERY

About Alexandra Figueroa, Ph.D.

I am a Postdoctoral Scholar in Racial Equity at University of California Berkeley, Haas School of Business. Currently, I study the inclusion of marginalized populations in organizations, and how such topics are influenced by individual and organization-level moral systems.