Understanding the Influence of Technology in Leadership

Technology, Diversity, and Ethics
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Technology, Diversity, and Ethics
Technology and its use in organizations have been associated with improved efficiency and performance at the workplace. However, leaders, especially those diverse managing teams, need to understand how to effectively manage technology and diversity to facilitate ethical behaviors and decision-making. Organizations that manage diversity and ethics appropriately drastically improve their performance because they understand that employees from diverse groups have different ethical values (Dagogo & Ehior, 2019). Acknowledging these differences and leveraging them can help organizations gain a competitive advantage because they reflect the society that the organization serves. Integrating diversity and technology can be a powerful tool for organizations, but it can also raise ethical issues. As Martin, Shilton, and Smith (2019) indicate, leaders of organizations have a responsibility to ensure that any ethical issues arising from the use of technology in the organization are addressed. This paper explores some of the potential ethical concerns that leaders may encounter in managing technology and diversity. It also recommends strategies that leaders can use to address these ethical concerns.
Potential Ethical Issues
One of the main ethical issues that arise from managing technology and diversity is privacy. In a diverse team, leaders can use technology to create transparency and promote awareness among members of the organization (Morrison-Smith & Ruiz, 2020). Oftentimes, managing diverse teams can be clouded by ignorance, where members of one diverse group are ignorant of the other group and their values, beliefs, and norms. However, through technology, leaders can ensure that diverse groups of employees feel connected by sharing information that creates awareness. However, as Morrison-Smith and Ruiz (2020) indicate, this can also raise ethical concerns about privacy. Leaders and employees also use technology to share information and create awareness need to ensure that they are not infringing privacy rights in the process. The more information is shared, the more vulnerable people become. In addition, people from diverse groups have very different degrees of privacy and might consider sharing some information as an infringement of privacy. For instance, collectivistic may not feel the same about privacy as individualistic societies. There is also the issue of balancing the need for employee privacy and employee monitoring. Modern leaders are using data-driven technologies to monitor employee behavior at work. However, sometimes they monitor behavior that is not related to work (Ebert, Wildhaber, & Adams-Prassi, 2021), causing ethical issues because this can be seen as an infringement of privacy.
Another issue is algorithmic bias, especially arising from recruiting automation. The use of algorithms in decision-making has become prominent, but it also raises potential ethical issues. Algorithms make decisions based on their data (Martin, Shilton, & Smith, 2019; Townes-Whitley, 2017). When leaders decide to use automation for the entire hiring process, they risk u...