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Introduction
For decades scholars have contended that to be genuinely representative, organizational settings must be inclusive and diverse (e.g. see Long, 1952). It is, therefore, incumbent upon managers to help create a workplace environment that supports inclusivity; a safe and respectful context where employees can effectively achieve their individual and collective performance goals. While these efforts offer universal benefits (McKay and Avery, 2015), performance demands, public discourse, media coverage, and today’s broader sociopolitical narrative often impose a very different message. Rather than encouraging respect, the dominant focus amplifies and encourages self-interest, exclusion, and divisiveness. Democratic legal protections are intended to prevent discrimination and strive to support fairness, but the reality is that laws cannot ensure that an organization’s climate genuinely endorses ethical actions that support inclusion and foster respect. For example, there is a rise in anti-Muslimism and Islamophobia in today’s workplace, despite having policies in place that mandate employee training (e.g. to prevent harassment) (Society for Human Resource Management, 2018). The Council on American–Islamic relations, the largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization in the USA, reported a 57 percent increase in anti-Muslim incidents in 2016 over the previous year (CAIR, 2017). When Muslims are repeatedly marginalized in public, it is no surprise that Islamophobic forms of prejudice and discrimination are becoming more prevalent in today’s workplace.
Purpose of this research
This work addresses Islamophobia and anti-Muslimism, which are emergent forms of discrimination, now salient management ethical issues requiring attention (Mahadevan and Mayer, 2017). To understand how this type of discrimination manifests in organizational settings, we started our inquiry with an examination of the current literature regarding Islamophobia and anti-Muslimism. Seeing the need for more granularity on the subject, we: conducted an exploratory study to examine salient cases where anti-Muslimism and Islamophobia were present, in a representative sample provided by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and identified key elements of conflict over a ten-year period (1996–2016), bringing forward core themes. A central observation from this analysis was that adherence to organizational policies may be in conflict with the appearance of being Muslim. Findings from this study informed our recommendations to inculcate a more proactive approach to develop and sustain respect in the workplace. To advance this idea, balanced experiential inquiry (BEI) is presented...