Buckets under a leaky roof: A critical framework of obfuscated social hierarchies in organizations and their impact on interpersonal dynamics

Organizations in the United States exist in a hierarchical context, with gendered, racialized, and heteronormative influences. However, leaders seeking to mitigate bias and discrimination in organizations often treat organizations as impermeable structures immune to these influences. This blindness stymies their ability to treat the core activators of interpersonal conflict, rather than solely the symptoms. Merging bodies of work that identify and describe systems of oppression, we develop a framework that illuminates the cascading influence of such socio-historical factors on organizational processes. We integrate sociological, institutional, and systems psychodynamics theories to document how arbitrary hierarchies influence everything from how organizations form to interpersonal interactions. In doing so, we clarify the most appropriate applications of common terminology used to describe the experiences of disadvantaged groups (e.g., discrimination, marginalization, minoritization). Specifically, we redirect scholars’ usage of the term “microaggressions” away from the subtlety of the microaggression (which has been the focus of past research in this topic) to highlight their origin in – and maintenance of – hegemonic organizational power structures. We then utilize this framework to generate recommendations to help organizational leaders “stop the leak” or ameliorate the influence of hegemonic hierarchies in their workplace.