The role of perceived autonomy-supportive communication for motivating prejudice reduction and avoiding defiant backlash within the police force workplace

Abstract

Workplace prejudice-reduction efforts tend to be short lived at best, and can even arouse defiance, or a desire to oppose requests or rules, in employees. The motivational approach of self-determination theory (SDT) describes how communicating about prejudice reduction can be scaffolded in ways that inspire genuine motivation and avoid eliciting defensive responses. From an SDT perspective, such autonomy-supportive communications take the perspective of the employee, provide choice about how to best approach attitude change, provide a rationale or compelling reason for the importance of change, offer structure through explaining the consequences of bias, and avoid the use of shame to compel change. In two multi-wave studies with British police officers and staff, we hypothesized that employees would report lower prejudice (operationalized as having less antagonistic attitudes toward police forces investing in diversity) when they perceived forces to communicate about prejudice in autonomy-supportive ways (Studies 1 and 2). We also tested whether this association would be explained by lower defiance when perceiving the force to communicate in autonomy-supportive ways (Study 2). Results supported the main effect of perceived autonomy-supportive communication relating to lower prejudice in multi-wave (Study 1, n = 1226) and longitudinal data (Study 2, n = 232). We consider implications for communicating about prejudice-reduction efforts in the workplace.