LGBT Employee Groups In Organizations

LGBT Employee Groups in Organizations

Introduction

The emergence of LGBT groups and communities within organizational frameworks has been a journey that has fueled both opportune moments of innovation and change, as well as issues and problems which seem to erode the foundation upon which organizations and businesses are built. Transgender, bisexual, gay, and lesbian groups have become prominent in the organizations of today where they have been integrated into the fabric of organizational functioning in the form of affinity groups, employee networks, and employee resource groups. However, even with the emergence of such groups in the form of structural and functional entities, not enough light has been shed in terms of the paradigms that

In other words, these groups act as allies for the purpose of advocating equal rights for employees who belong to the community in question. Authors like Scully & Segal (2002), most groups that have been established for the purpose of catering to the needs of LGBT minorities within organizational contexts have been specifically based upon the need to express themselves within the confines of an established and structured framework. In other words, the authors found that the basic existence and the journey that characterized the establishment of these groups essentially posed as their main achievement. According to the leaders and the main individuals responsible for setting up these groups, the basis of their establishment involved providing a space or a platform for enabling the continual and consistent struggle for ensuring that the suppressed minority LGBT community is allowed to be more vocal about their place in organizations as well as the various ways in which they can enable the betterment of the same if given enough opportunities and equal standing when compared to their counterparts in an organizational context. In this manner, the main focus of these groups seems to be on the provision of visibility and comfort for these minority

However, their main objective is to bring about social and cultural change in terms of their members’ position in the organization that they have built their ambivalent purpose around. An important characteristic that defines LGBT groups within the organized unofficial paradigm is their highly structured manner of functioning. Some examples of these highly structured groups or external frameworks which are designed to put pressure on the organization for specific purposes include labor unions, which are completely self-sustained bodies that have their own internal culture and also elect their own leaders. However, in the case of LGBT groups, the communal entities existing outside the organization within this paradigm need not be directly connected or structurally formulated in the manner of specific unions (Colgan & Ledwith, 2000). Moreover, owing to their external level of existence, their main objectives are not specifically related to the improvement of overall organizational effectiveness. Rather, their main objective lies in the framework within which they exist, namely the inherent way in which they have integrated into a union, or the nature and the direction of the union which they are a part of. Authors like Duggan (2003) have observed external groups such as Pride at Work, which is essentially an umbrella organization