HDM harm is structural, not demographic

HDM harm operates independently of the demographic identity of the person subjected to it. Choices that bind without their reasoning being answerable, foreclosed resistance, investment captivity, individual attribution of failure — none of these require a particular demographic profile to activate. They require only a position inside an HDM organisation.

The evidence is consistent with this. Prins found supervisors and managers reporting more lifetime depression than either workers or owners. Read through positions that combine authority over others with subordination to those above, that pattern comes from structural position rather than from demographic identity. Discrimination, marginalisation and exclusion cannot account for managers reporting higher depression rates than the workers they supervise. What accounts for it is the position: more invested in the organisation, more answerable for outcomes they cannot control, more exposed when a failure is attributed to a person. Demographic privilege is no protection against it.

Caprar, Walker, and Ashforth (2022) found that strong organisational identification leads to work-family conflict, workaholism, reduced wellbeing, and burnout. Long organisational identification did not protect Robert. It deepened the entanglement that makes exit feel like self-annihilation. Petriglieri (2011) terms these identity-protection responses, and Conroy and O’Leary-Kelly (2014) find genuine grief when organisational identity is threatened by departure.

DEI addresses a real and serious problem. Its frame is demographic disadvantage: the systematic exclusion and harm experienced by people on the basis of identity. That frame does not reach Robert. His disadvantage is structural and positional. No diversity initiative considers him, because he is not, by any demographic measure, disadvantaged. No occupational health framework names what happened to him with sufficient precision to make it actionable.

The two are the same architecture met from different positions, and the companion paper on discrimination develops what these conditions produce for those who also face identity-based threat, where the attribution available to the structure carries a second layer (Verweij, 2026d).

Improving demographic representation without changing the decision-making architecture does not reduce this harm. It extends it to new populations, with identity-based stigma added to the failure attribution when things go wrong. A diverse leadership team operating inside HDM is still a leadership team held accountable for outcomes it cannot control.

Ryan and Haslam (2005, 2007) documented across multiple studies that women and minorities are disproportionately appointed to leadership positions during organisational crisis, when failure risk is highest. In the terms of this paper, that is the combination the mechanism runs on at full strength: answerable for everything, able to control little, highly visible, and fully exposed to the individual attribution of failure. The appointment is presented as progress. The structure makes it evidence of the opposite.

The prediction for the person appointed follows from that. The response is foreclosed for them as it is for everyone under the architecture. What is raised is the threat: they are answerable for an outcome that was already failing when they arrived, so the failure is more likely to come, and when it comes there is no more reasoning on record for them than for anyone else. They are more likely to be harmed, and the position is why, not anything about them.

Leslie, Mayer, and Kravitz (2014), across forty-five samples, found that people selected through diversity initiatives report lower self-competence and more negative affect than others do, before any outcome has arrived. Ma (2022), across Chinese listed companies, found a one-standard-deviation fall in performance raising the likelihood of forced turnover by 4.19% for women chief executives against 1.19% for men. Hadlock, Obermann, and Pierce (2025) found the gender gap in executive turnover doubling at the worst-performing firms. Cook and Glass (2013, 2014) found the replacement to be a white man. What none of them measures is what this does to the person it happens to. The meta-analysis (Morgenroth, Kirby, Ryan, and Sudkamper, 2020) covers who is appointed and when, and not what becomes of them.