Dynamics of Employee Resource Groups: Investigating the Experiences of their Leaders

Organizations are often forced to react to external stimuli or jolts. A key environmental jolt, the race riots of the 1960s, created a situation in which organizations were forced to respond to growing concerns about equality. One of the innovative solutions that emerged was affinity groups, which was the precursor to Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). However, despite the long-standing existence of both affinity groups and ERGs, they are not well understood, and there is very little research on these organizations. In order to move scholarly work forward on the topic of ERGs, we introduce a study focused on the leaders of these groups. We conduct interviews with ten ERG leaders working in three different organizations. The research deploys a subjectivist interpretive perspective to shed insight into the dynamics of the leader roles and their ERG work. Through this process we find and describe five key themes of interest: (1) The first topic explores the role of leadership - A Mixture of Hierarchy and Grass...