David A. Songco, PsyD
You’ve seen this scene. A leader opens the year with a statement on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. It’s polished. It sounds sincere. People nod. Then the work starts up again and nothing moves. The hiring pipeline looks like last year’s. The colleague who flagged a microaggression gets labeled “difficult.” The inclusion task force has no budget, no authority, and a meeting schedule that quietly thins out by spring.
Nobody in that scene has to be acting in bad faith, and that’s what makes it so hard to name. I call it empty leadership: a public commitment to DEIB without the behavior, structures, or risk-taking the commitment would require. As group psychologists, we should care less about what the leader intended and more about what the group learns from watching. And who pays for the gap?
What I Mean by Empty Leadership
Argyris and Schön (1974) separated the espoused theory we announce from the theory-in-use that actually drives what we do, often outside our awareness. Empty leadership is that gap, with DEIB as the content. The language is there. The resources, authority, risk, and accountability aren’t.
Simons (2002) calls it behavioral integrity: how closely a leader’s words and deeds seem to match. He also argued that managers tend to misjudge their own match. So the leader who gave that heartfelt statement may honestly feel committed. The group, watching what comes next, reaches another conclusion.
I don’t mean malice. I don’t mean ordinary imperfection either, since every leader misses their stated values sometimes. I mean a pattern where the commitment never costs the leader anything, and the group figures out that it never will.
Why Good Intentions Are Not Enough
A few processes can keep a sincere leader stuck in that gap. One is moral credentialing. Monin and Miller (2001) proposed that people who have established their egalitarian credentials feel freer to act in ways that might otherwise look prejudiced, and a public DEIB commitment could serve as exactly that kind of credential. I’d hold the idea loosely, though. A meta-analysis found only a small average licensing effect (Blanken et al., 2015), and a large preregistered replication of the original credentialing study failed to reproduce its findings (Xiao et al., 2024). It’s a plausible mechanism, but not a settled one.
Then there’s cost. A statement is cheap and visible. Enactment is expensive and mostly invisible: shifting resources, changing who gets promoted, sitting through a hard conversation. Without reliable accountability, leaders and groups both drift toward what’s cheap.
And there’s self-assessment. Leaders judge themselves by intent. Everyone else judges them by what happens. If a leader’s sense of alignment is inflated (Simons, 2002), the gap never registers for the one person with the most power to close it.
What the Group Experiences
We’re trained to ask what a leader’s behavior does to the group, not just what it means to the leader. The effects here are fairly predictable.
Start with psychological safety, the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking (Edmondson, 1999). In her study, team psychological safety was associated with learning behavior, and learning behavior linked safety to performance. Watch a leader say one thing and do another, and you learn how risky it is to speak up. Simons (2002) theorized that low behavioral integrity erodes trust and credibility, which safety depends on.
Then the group as a whole. Bion (1961) described how groups under anxiety slip out of work-group functioning into basic-assumption states. One way to read an empty DEIB statement is as a shared defense. The group gets to feel it has dealt with something painful, by leaning on the leader to fix it or by fleeing the harder work, without doing any of it. The anxiety eases. The problem stays put.
Scapegoating enters here too. Whoever names the gap becomes the carrier of the group’s discomfort. That’s not only a clinical hunch. Kaiser et al. (2013) found that when diversity structures were present, high-status participants reacted more harshly to members of underrepresented groups who claimed discrimination. A group that badly wants to believe it’s fair can turn the messenger into the problem.
Smith and Freyd (2014) called the larger pattern institutional betrayal: harm that happens when an institution fails the people who depend on it. They also described betrayal blindness, the tendency of insiders not to see it, because seeing it would threaten relationships they value. Empty leadership can produce both. The failure is quiet, and everyone has a reason not to look.
When the Structure Itself Becomes the Signal
The diversity-structures research shows what’s at stake. Kaiser et al. (2013) found that the mere presence of a diversity structure led high-status participants (White participants, men) to see the organization as fairer to underrepresented groups, even when bias was clear. The structure got in the way of noticing discrimination. The authors also pointed out that courts have increasingly treated such structures as evidence of compliance. The illusion isn’t limited to the advantaged, either. Diversity structures led women to legitimize discrimination too (Brady et al., 2015), and diversity awards made biased procedures seem fairer (Kirby et al., 2015).
None of this means the structures are useless. The same research notes that they often raise underrepresented members’ sense of belonging. The trouble starts when the structure becomes the proof of fairness instead of the way to test it.
The work of enactment also tends to land on the people with the least power. Hekman et al. (2017) studied 362 executives and found that nonwhite and female leaders who engaged in diversity-valuing behavior got lower performance ratings from their bosses. White and male leaders got no rating boost for the same behavior. That’s Kanter’s (1977) tokenism dynamic at the top. The most visible, most different people are asked to carry the group’s work on difference, and they pay for it.
There’s a counterpoint. Dobbin and Kalev (2016) reviewed what actually moves the needle. Mandatory training and other control-heavy tactics often fail or backfire. What did better: getting managers engaged in solving the problem, increasing contact across groups, and building social accountability through task forces and diversity managers. All of those put something at stake for the people holding power.
From Empty to Enacted
If the gap is the problem, the work is making it visible and discussable. Here are five questions a group, a consultant, or a leader can ask. They’re my own synthesis of the research above, not a validated instrument.
- Cost. What has the leader given up, risked, or redistributed? A commitment that costs nothing is just a statement.
- Authority. Do DEIB structures have budget, decision rights, and real data? Or only a mandate to “raise awareness”?
- Consequence. What happens to the person who names a gap? Look at how the group treated the last one.
- Data. Does the group look at its own outcomes, such as who gets hired, promoted, and retained, and who does the unrecognized work? Or does it assume the program works?
- Repair. When the leader falls short, is the rupture named and repaired? Simons (2002) acknowledged that some gap between words and deeds is inevitable. A group can live with a leader who names it.
These questions apply to us too. Group psychologists run training programs, institutes, clinics, and professional societies, and we’re not exempt. What we bring is practice working with the group as a whole: naming what’s unspoken, tolerating the anxiety that follows, and protecting the member who says the uncomfortable thing. That’s the opposite of empty leadership. We can start practicing it where we work.
A statement of commitment is where DEIB leadership starts. It isn’t proof of anything. Groups know the difference, usually long before their leaders do, and they respond to what they see. If we want our groups and institutions to be places where difference can actually be talked about, the measure is what we do after the statement.
References
Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1974). Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness. Jossey-Bass.
Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in groups and other papers. Tavistock.
Blanken, I., van de Ven, N., & Zeelenberg, M. (2015). A meta-analytic review of moral licensing. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(4), 540–558. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167215572134
Brady, L. M., Kaiser, C. R., Major, B., & Kirby, T. A. (2015). It’s fair for us: Diversity structures cause women to legitimize discrimination. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 57, 100–110.
Dobbin, F., & Kalev, A. (2016). Why diversity programs fail. Harvard Business Review, 94(7–8), 52–60.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Hekman, D. R., Johnson, S. K., Foo, M.-D., & Yang, W. (2017). Does diversity-valuing behavior result in diminished performance ratings for non-white and female leaders? Academy of Management Journal, 60(2), 771–797.
Kaiser, C. R., Major, B., Jurcevic, I., Dover, T. L., Brady, L. M., & Shapiro, J. R. (2013). Presumed fair: Ironic effects of organizational diversity structures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(3), 504–519. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030838
Kanter, R. M. (1977). Men and women of the corporation. Basic Books.
Kirby, T. A., Kaiser, C. R., & Major, B. (2015). Insidious procedures: Diversity awards legitimize unfair organizational practices. Social Justice Research, 28(2), 169–186. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-015-0240-z
Monin, B., & Miller, D. T. (2001). Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 33–43. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.81.1.33
Simons, T. (2002). Behavioral integrity: The perceived alignment between managers’ words and deeds as a research focus. Organization Science, 13(1), 18–35. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.13.1.18.543
Smith, C. P., & Freyd, J. J. (2014). Institutional betrayal. American Psychologist, 69(6), 575–587. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037564
Xiao, Q., Li, L. C., Au, Y. L., Tan, S. N., Chung, W. T., & Feldman, G. (2024). Licensing via credentials: Replication Registered Report of Monin and Miller (2001) with extensions investigating the domain-specificity of moral credentials and the association between the credential effect and trait reputational concern. International Review of Social Psychology, 37(1), Article 10. https://doi.org/10.5334/irsp.945.