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The purpose of this paper is to build insight into how the local community impacts an organization’s ability to develop an inclusive culture. The paper introduces the concept of inclusion disconnects as incongruent experiences of inclusion between an organization and its community. Then, using the case of teaching hospitals, the paper empirically demonstrates how individuals and organizations experience and deal with inclusion disconnects across the boundaries of organization and community.

A multi-method qualitative study was conducted in hospitals located in the same city. Focus groups were conducted with 11 medical trainees from underrepresented backgrounds and semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten leaders involved with diversity efforts at two hospitals. Data analysis followed an iterative approach built from Miles and Huberman (1994).

The findings demonstrate how boundary conflicts arise from disconnected experiences of organizational and community inclusiveness. Such disconnects create challenges for leaders in retaining and supporting minority individuals, and for trainees in feeling like they could build a life within, and outside of, their organizations. Based on findings from the data, the paper offers insights into how organizations can build their capacity to address these challenges by engaging in boundary work across organizational and community domains.

Future research should build upon this work by further examining how inclusion disconnects between communities and organizations impact individuals and organizations.

The paper includes in-depth insight into how organizations can build their capacity to address such a deep-rooted challenge that comes from a less inclusive community.

This paper contributes to an understanding of how forces from the community outside an organization can shape internal efforts toward fostering inclusion and individuals’ experiences of inclusion.

A new phenomenon called “Glass Cliff” has formed claiming that women at the higher echelons of organizations are being placed in higher risk positions when compared to men. The purpose of this research study is to examine whether this phenomenon occurs at the middle to upper middle management levels for women. If so, it can possibly be one of the many underlying reasons that contribute to the grounds of why the pipeline problem exists with female leadership at the top-level management positions.

The design considers competing hypotheses based on the emerging, contradictory research on the Glass Cliff and the more established perspective of social norms and implicit biases. The experimental study is conducted on 202 participants to examine the likelihood of occurrence of this phenomenon at middle to upper middle management levels.

Counter to the tenets pertaining to the Glass Cliff phenomenon but consistent with the implicit leadership theories, this research study revealed that when compared to the female candidate, the male candidate was more likely to be assigned to the higher risk position.

The subjective nature of the study can be the reason for variations of each participant and their biases since it is a specific experiment dealing with perceptions, social norms and prejudice.

This phenomenon is mostly studied at the executive level and can contribute to the pipeline problem for women, hence this study provides insight and examines the phenomenon at the middle to upper middle management levels to examine its likelihood.