policy support
Definition
Policy support refers to the degree to which individuals endorse and enact organizational policies, encompassing both attitudinal and behavioral dimensions that do not necessarily align. In the context of Diversity and Inclusion, attitudinal support reflects beliefs about a policy's fairness, credibility, and usefulness, while behavioral support concerns actions that actively promote implementation, such as publicly declaring support or modeling policy values. These two dimensions can diverge substantially: some employees express attitudinal endorsement while remaining behaviorally passive, whereas others comply behaviorally despite attitudinal skepticism. Survey data from 2,639 employees in a Dutch organization identified five empirically derived support profiles, Champions, Opponents, Ambivalents, Bystanders, and Reluctants, through k-means clustering, demonstrating that a binary for-or-against framing systematically misclassifies the range of employee responses. Latent Class Analysis further revealed five distinct reasoning patterns underlying these profiles, including ideological endorsement, advocacy-oriented critique, meritocratic rejection, and policy unawareness, with pattern-to-profile alignment confirmed at χ²(16, N=1,407)=573.46, p<.001, Cramér's V=.32.
Sources: Bokern et al. (2026)
Related Terms
- leadership (1 shared article)
- diversity (1 shared article)
- D&I policy (1 shared article)
- inclusion (1 shared article)
- policy resistance (1 shared article)
Applications
Policy Support and Organizational Position
Managers and non-managerial employees differ systematically in how they are distributed across policy support profiles. Managers were overrepresented among Champions and Reluctants and underrepresented among Ambivalents and Opponents, a difference confirmed at χ²(4, N=2,638)=109.96, p<.001, Cramér's V=.20. This pattern reflects the distinct roles and expectations attached to managerial positions, which anchor divergent motivations for supporting or enacting D&I policy relative to employees who lack formal implementation responsibility.
Sources: Bokern et al. (2026)
Policy Support and Minority Status
Perceived minority status is associated with more critical policy support profiles and with advocacy-oriented reasoning. Employees who identified as belonging to a minority group were overrepresented among Reluctants and Opponents, and their open-ended reasoning more frequently reflected critique from an advocacy perspective, χ²(4, N=1,405)=34.55, p<.001, V=.16. This finding indicates that group membership shapes the motivational basis of policy engagement, with minoritized employees responding to D&I policy through a lens of personal relevance and structural concern rather than ideological endorsement.
Sources: Bokern et al. (2026)
Policy Support and Policy Awareness
Awareness of an organization's D&I policy is directly implicated in the profile of support an employee displays. Ambivalents and Opponents were disproportionately associated with reasoning patterns classified as expressing unawareness or reporting inaccessibility, which together accounted for 55 percent of all reasoning instances in the sample. Profiles remained robust after adding policy awareness as a variable in the clustering solution, confirming that awareness operates as a meaningful precondition for both attitudinal and behavioral engagement rather than as a redundant proxy for support.
Sources: Bokern et al. (2026)
