No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Accounting for the Gap: A Firm Study Manipulating Organizational Accountability and Transparency in Pay Decisions
Abstract
Great progress has been made in documenting how employer practices may shape workplace inequality. Less research attention, however, has been given to investigating which organizational strategies are effective at addressing gender and racial inequality in labor markets. Using a unique field study design, this article identifies and tests, for the first time, whether accountability and transparency in pay decisions-two popular organizational initiatives discussed among scholars and practitioners-may reduce the pay gap by employee gender, race, and foreign nationality. Through a longitudinal analysis of a large private company, I study the performance-based reward decisions concerning almost 9,000 employees before and after high-level management adopted a set of organizational procedures, introducing accountability and transparency into the company's performance-reward system. Before such procedures were introduced, there was an observed gap in the distribution of performance-based rewards where women, ethnic minorities, and non-U.S.-born employees received lower monetary rewards compared with U.S.-born white men having the same performance evaluation scores and working in the same job and work unit with the same manager and the same human capital characteristics. Analyses of the company's employee performance-reward data after the adoption of accountability and transparency procedures show a reduction in this pay gap. I conclude by discussing the implications of this study for future research about employer strategies targeting workplace inequality and diversity.
... Decision making within employment contexts is typically endogenous, which makes it difficult to draw causal inferences (Oyer and Schaefer, 2011;Mocanu, 2022). Also, organizations that adopt new processes (e.g., new hiring practices) often do so at once, which impedes the creation of a control group to approximate the counterfactual (Castilla, 2015;Tolbert and Castilla, 2017). We address these identification challenges by exploiting the fact that Alpha adopted the new hiring process in seven predetermined, staggered time waves across all its worldwide subsidiaries. ...
... Alternatively, and given HR's involvement, hiring managers might feel more accountable to HR in terms of the predefined evaluation criteria as laid out in their job planning meetings or, more broadly, in their overall decision making throughout the hiring process. Prior research suggests that accountability, the expectation that one can be called on to justify one's actions to others (Lerner and Tetlock, 1999), can reduce the scope of subjective assessment (Castilla, 2015). ...
... Prior research examines the impact of organizational practices that are specifically designed to reduce disparities (e.g., Reskin and McBrier, 2000;Kalev, Dobbin, and Kelly, 2006;Abendroth et al., 2017). This literature provides insights into, for example, the ways that managerial responsibility, transparency, and accountability can reduce disparities in pay and promotion contexts (Kalev, Dobbin, and Kelly, 2006;Castilla, 2015); the (limited) effectiveness of diversity initiatives (Kalev, Dobbin, and Kelly, 2006); and the effects of formalized HR practices, such as hiring procedures or written performance evaluations, on reducing disparities in managerial staffing and pay (Reskin and McBrier, 2000;Abendroth et al., 2017). The intervention in our study was not aimed at reducing disparities, and the fact that it increased the share of women entering the organization suggests that organizational practices do not necessarily have to target explicit diversity issues or goals, such as programs targeting managerial bias or organizational structures allocating explicit responsibility and accountability for diversity goals (e.g., Kalev, Dobbin, and Kelly, 2006;Castilla, 2015). ...
A substantial body of research examines the relevance of hiring as a source of gender disparities in organizations. However, there is limited evidence on how different sets of key organizational decision makers contribute to gender disparities in hiring outcomes. To address this research gap, we exploit the staggered adoption of a new hiring process in a multinational corporation, which transferred from hiring managers to HR departments the task of shortlisting: narrowing a large pool of candidates to a more manageable set before final decision making. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that the transfer of shortlisting responsibility increased the share of newly hired women. Additional tests based on quantitative and qualitative data are largely consistent with our finding that the transfer of shortlisting from hiring managers to HR departments led to fewer gender disparities in hiring outcomes given the increased expert knowledge in evaluating candidates and reduced opportunity costs for conducting such evaluations. Our setting offers a unique opportunity to help isolate key organizational decision makers’ role in contributing to gender disparities in hiring outcomes, and our findings have implications for how to alleviate gender disparities in employment.
... Salary is intended to be determined based on objective criteria, which are meant to eliminate subconscious prejudice in decision-making (Abraham, 2017;Adam Cobb, 2016;Castilla, 2012). Although it is generally assumed that merit-based reward leads to less inequality than labour market competition and tournament-based rewards (Adam Cobb, 2016;Castilla & Benard, 2010;Nishii et al., 2018), research shows that formalized systems in themselves do not offer protection and can even increase inequalities with the introduction of meritocratic systems (Abraham, 2017;Castilla, 2015;Nielsen, 2016a;Śliwa & Johansson, 2014). ...
... There are several reasons why merit, as expressed in apparent objective criteria, is sensitive to gender inequality. First, in procedures where decision-makers have some discretion, bias is likely to affect their decisions (Castilla, 2015). When managers are given the opportunity to deviate from the procedures by making exceptions at their own discretion inequality is often the (unintended) result (Dencker, 2008). ...
... Rather, strict and formal procedures for salary decisions invoke system justification beliefs: the feeling that decisions in the system are fair because the system is fair. Decision-makers are not challenged to evaluate their own assumptions, because of the assumption (Abraham, 2017;Castilla, 2015). Making exceptions also opens the door for informal negotiations, in which men are more likely to engage in than women (Brooks & Schweitzer, 2011). ...
The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online.
Up until now Talent Management (TM) in higher education institutes has received limited academic attention. This diverse collection offers a thoughtful overview of how talent is defined in higher education; the implementation of TM practices; how this is perceived by employees; and its impact on academic performance. Talent Management in Higher Education uses a multi-level and multi-actor perspective and positions the contemporary TM issues of universities in the broader institutional context in which universities are constituted and the historical developments regarding HRM and TM policies.
Both scholars and practitioners will appreciate the insights into the issues of different academic systems, increasing the readers awareness of the contextual relevance of talent management. All chapters in the book are written by scholars who are expert on research in talent management or in Higher Education, but who are also insiders in the academic community. Through their personal expertise they mirror academia as a research object.
... This triggers feelings of benign envy (van de Ven et al., 2009), boosting the motivation to focus on the task (Kim & Kim, 2020) and improve one's performance through learning (Bernstein, 2017). Availability of performance information also signals to employees that there is nothing to hide, increasing individuals' perception of the performance management system as fair (Bamberger, 2023;Castilla, 2015;Schnackenberg & Tomlinson, 2016). ...
... Specifically, we argue that narrative feedback, that is, information explaining a performance rating and offering insight into how the individual can improve his or her performance in the future, and an individual's relative performance position moderate the effects of performance feedback transparency on performance outcomes. theoretical arguments from performance feedback literature (e.g., Kluger & DeNisi, 1996;Moore & Klein, 2008) and organizational transparency literature (e.g., Bamberger, 2023;Brown et al., 2022;Castilla, 2015;Schnackenberg & Tomlinson, 2016), our model speaks to the contradictory effects of performance feedback transparency theoretically. By testing the model empirically, we causally identify the performance consequences of performance feedback transparency and provide an explanation on the mechanisms. ...
... Research on organizational transparency also suggests that while secrecy can breed distrust and signal opportunism, transparency fosters trust and enhances perceptions of informational justice (Belogolovsky & Bamberger, 2014;Castilla, 2008Castilla, , 2015Schnackenberg & Tomlinson, 2016). Informational justice reflects the extent to which procedures and outcome distributions are explained in an adequate, honest, open, and candid way (Colquitt, 2001;Scott et al., 2007). ...
... We therefore employ generalized estimation equations (GEE) to test our hypotheses related to promotions. GEE, which take into account the nonindependence of observations and repeated observations over time, have been widely used by researchers who examined wage or promotion gaps linked to gender, race, or nationality (e.g., Castilla, 2008Castilla, , 2015. Since our dependent variable (promotion) is binary, we specify a binominal distribution with a logit link function. ...
... Formalized selection processes for internal positions-such as using standardized assessments or linking promotion decisions to performance appraisals based on rigorously defined criteria-help reduce gender bias (Castilla, 2015). Practices that increase decision makers' accountability for promotion-related decisions are among the most effective to boost the proportion of minorities (Dobbin et al., 2015). ...
... For example, corporate diversity task forces or diversity managers may foster accountability through scrutinizing indicators of gender differences in promotions, forcing managers to explain and defend their decisions, or helping make managers' promotion decisions more visible to others in the organization (Castilla, 2015;Dobbin et al., 2015). ...
Drawing on gender role and gender queuing theories, we employ a multi‐stage process model to investigate demand‐ and supply‐side drivers of gender promotion gaps and to explore variations in these gaps across different business units within an organization. Analyzing 9 years of personnel records from a multiunit European bank, we find that the gender promotion gap is influenced by both supply‐side and demand‐side factors. Specifically, women are less likely than men to express a motivation to change to a new job or move to a different unit within the bank. Those who do express such motivation are as likely as men to be reassigned to new roles, but their moves are less likely to constitute promotions than are men's moves. Furthermore, gender promotion gaps vary significantly within the organization itself. Business units with the most significant gaps are in regions that have fewer available organizational positions to move into, diminishing women's motivation to seek such moves, and have jobs with numerous incumbents, decreasing women's chances to get a new job or secure a promotion upon doing so. This study extends gender role theory by creating a unified theoretical model that incorporates both employee and employer gender role perceptions as drivers of promotions. It contributes to gender queuing theory by demonstrating the theory's relevance to promotion outcomes.
... Salary is intended to be determined based on objective criteria, which are meant to eliminate subconscious prejudice in decision-making (Abraham, 2017;Adam Cobb, 2016;Castilla, 2012). Although it is generally assumed that merit-based reward leads to less inequality than labour market competition and tournament-based rewards (Adam Cobb, 2016;Castilla & Benard, 2010;Nishii et al., 2018), research shows that formalized systems in themselves do not offer protection and can even increase inequalities with the introduction of meritocratic systems (Abraham, 2017;Castilla, 2015;Nielsen, 2016a;Śliwa & Johansson, 2014). ...
... There are several reasons why merit, as expressed in apparent objective criteria, is sensitive to gender inequality. First, in procedures where decision-makers have some discretion, bias is likely to affect their decisions (Castilla, 2015). When managers are given the opportunity to deviate from the procedures by making exceptions at their own discretion inequality is often the (unintended) result (Dencker, 2008). ...
... Rather, strict and formal procedures for salary decisions invoke system justification beliefs: the feeling that decisions in the system are fair because the system is fair. Decision-makers are not challenged to evaluate their own assumptions, because of the assumption (Abraham, 2017;Castilla, 2015). Making exceptions also opens the door for informal negotiations, in which men are more likely to engage in than women (Brooks & Schweitzer, 2011). ...
... While it is difficult to assess whether an organization is making progress on a vague diversity goal (e.g., whether a company has followed through on a promise to "pursue equity for all"), it is easier to assess whether an organization is making progress on specific, measurable goals: The metrics and hoped-for outcome are clearly laid out and progress (or lack thereof) can be tracked. Increased accountability, in turn, should boost follow-through on diversity goals and commitments (Axt & To, 2024;Castilla, 2015;Costa, 2024;Kalev, 2014). If women and racial minorities forecast the benefits of specificity for goal achievement, they might expect organizations that publicly communicate measurable diversity goals to be more likely to follow through. ...
... Ironically, this would suggest that the very goals that signaled strategic benefits to women and racial minorities might undermine their chances of landing a job. It is worth exploring whether measurable goals boost the rate at which women and racial minorities are hired-consistent with research on goal setting theory and accountability (Axt & To, 2024;Castilla, 2015;Costa, 2024;Locke & Latham, 2006)-or lead to backlash. ...
Many organizations struggle to attract a demographically diverse workforce. How does adding a measurable goal to a public diversity commitment—for example, “We care about diversity” versus “We care about diversity and plan to hire at least one woman or racial minority for every White man we hire”—impact application rates from women and racial minorities? Extant psychological theory offers competing predictions about how historically marginalized applicants might respond to such goals. On one hand, measurable diversity goals may raise belongingness concerns among marginalized group members who are uncomfortable with being recruited and hired based on their demographics. On the other, measurable goals might increase organizational attraction by signaling that marginalized group members are more likely to be hired. In a preregistered field experiment (n = 5,557), including measurable diversity goals in job advertisements increased application likelihood among marginalized group members—women and racial minorities—by 6.5%, without sacrifices to candidate quality. These field effects were primarily driven by White women, who were 10.5% more likely to apply after seeing a measurable diversity goal. Follow-up studies with women (total n = 893, preregistered) and racial minorities (total n = 865, preregistered) suggest that although measurable diversity goals signal a more instrumental approach to diversity, they also increase perceived strategic benefits and beliefs that the organization’s commitment is genuine among both groups, which in turn are tied to increased willingness to apply. We discuss the tensions marginalized group members face when evaluating organizational diversity initiatives.
... Organizational transparency brings positive societal benefits, such as the prevention of corruption and fraud (e.g. Biggerstaff et al., 2015;Halter et al., 2009;van Zyl and Claey� e, 2019), and a reduction in workplace inequality (Castilla, 2015;Dobbin et al., 2015). Managers are assured that organizational transparency will help build trust with stakeholders (Auger, answer calls for the development of theory that better explains the drivers of organizational transparency across levels of analysis (Albu and Flyverbom, 2019;Baraibar-Diez et al., 2017;Heimst€ adt and Dobusch, 2018;Schnackenberg and Tomlinson, 2016;Villena and Dhanorkar, 2020). ...
... Organizations need to strategically consider how they curate and deliver information across stakeholder groups because revealing certain types of information is a double-edged sword. For example, revealing labor costs can lead to better performance (Shaw, 2015) and reduce workplace inequality (Castilla, 2015); however, it can also negatively affect employee cooperation (Bamberger and Belogolovsky, 2017). A similar situation is found with environmental transparency, where voluntary disclosure attracts attention to negative organizational impacts and may increase organizational capital prices (He et al., 2019). ...
Purpose
Despite considerable evidence of the benefits of organizational transparency, policies to enhance transparency often fail or are met with resistance and unexpected results. In part, this is due to a lack of knowledge about the drivers of organizational transparency and their interrelationships. This study examines the interplay among the forces that influence organizational transparency, and thus answers numerous calls for developing a deeper theoretical understanding of the determinants of organizational transparency. We propose three forces that influence organizational transparency and theorize how they combine in nonlinear ways to form five archetypical transparency regimes that organizations operate within. We then discuss contingencies to organizational transparency within each regime.
Design/methodology/approach
We employ configurational theorizing to capture the complexity of transparency and the nonlinear relationships among the forces of transparency.
Findings
We propose three forces that influence organizational transparency: institutional, societal, and leadership. We identify configurations of the three forces that yield five archetypical transparency regimes. We then discuss contingencies for cultivating organizational transparency within each regime. Vanguard transparency and pioneering transparency represent the desired regimes for fostering organizational transparency. In contrast, hollow transparency and deceptive transparency reveal a combination of determinants that cultivate less desirable forms of organizational transparency. Paradoxical transparency represents a regime in which socially desirable outcomes are associated with undesirable consequences for an organization.
Research limitations/implications
This paper is among the first to theorize the drivers of organizational transparency and to discuss the limits and boundaries of organizational responses to transparency determinants.
Practical implications
Despite the many benefits of transparency, we explain why efforts to enhance organizational transparency often fail or are met with mixed results. By considering the three forces, managers and policymakers can avoid unexpected and undesired organizational responses to transparency regimes.
Social implications
We propose five transparency regimes that place a spotlight on social contingencies to enhance transparency.
Originality/value
This study offers an integrative theory of organizational responses to transparency determinants and develops its theoretical foundations. The model integrates the fragmented empirical findings from previous studies on the determinants of transparency and draws attention to overlooked institutional, societal, and leadership forces that influence organizational transparency.
... Clearly defining evaluation criteria and consistently applying them can reduce discrimination in performance evaluations and promotion opportunities (Stamarski & Son Hing, 2015). Formalized and systematic HR processes result in better representation and equal opportunities for minority groups (Castilla, 2015). Additionally, it is important to critically examine the promotion criteria. ...
... Transparency in performance management processes is also crucial as it communicates expected behavior (Decramer & Audenaert, 2023) and allows for identification and addressing of irregularities, including structural discrimination (Caulfield, 2021). Transparent promotion processes contribute to an inclusive work environment where equal opportunities are ensured (Castilla, 2015). Leaders play a crucial role in implementing transparent performance management systems by building trust and possessing necessary skills and resources (Decramer & Audenaert, 2023). ...
Purpose
The context of a long-standing research tradition, discrimination has emerged as a critical factor contributing to inequalities within the labor market. While existing studies have primarily focused on overt discrimination during the recruitment and selection process, influenced by biases, attitudes, or stereotypes, there remains a significant knowledge gap regarding discrimination within the workplace and its underlying structural dimensions. This article aims to address this gap by examining the impact of organizational culture, structure and policies on workplace discrimination, with a particular emphasis on women and ethnic minorities.
Design/methodology/approach
Utilizing a case study strategy centered around a Belgian branch of a multinational professional service agency, data was gathered through ten semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted with employees representing various organizational levels.
Findings
The findings reveal that organizational culture, structure and policies may pose inherent risks in perpetuating discrimination throughout individuals' professional trajectories. Furthermore, it becomes apparent that, albeit often unconscious, these elements exhibit biases against women and ethnic minorities.
Social implications
Given the unintentional nature of structural discrimination, it is crucial to foster increased awareness and understanding of these dynamics.
Originality/value
The originality of this research article lies in its focus on addressing a critical knowledge gap in the existing research tradition on discrimination in the labor market. While previous studies have primarily concentrated on overt discrimination during recruitment and selection, this article delves into the often overlooked area of discrimination within the workplace itself. It explores the intricate interplay of organizational culture, structure and policies in perpetuating discrimination, particularly against women and ethnic minorities. By utilizing a case study approach within a multinational professional service agency in Belgium, the research uncovers hidden biases and unconscious elements contributing to structural discrimination. This emphasis on understanding unintentional discrimination adds a novel dimension to the discourse on workplace inequalities.
... Other work suggests that 10 Recent findings suggest a pathway to address this bias. In his study, Castilla (2015) found that increasing accountability and transparency into a company's performance-reward system can have beneficial outcomes for marginalized workers. He found that before accountability and transparency procedures were introduced, there was an observed gap in the distribution of performance-based rewards -whereby women, ethnic minorities, and non-U.S.-born employees received lower monetary rewards compared with U.S.-born white -and the adoption of accountability and transparency procedures reduced that pay gap. ...
Despite the fact that social and economic inequalities continue to be the “grand challenges” that besiege the world, the extant literature often treats experts and expertise in decontextualized way, treating experts as seemingly unaffected by or above social processes that generate or reproduce those inequalities. This review addresses this shortcoming by demonstrating two crucial pathways through which social and economic inequalities shape expertise: (1) the access to opportunities where individuals generate skills and capacities to compete in the labor market; (2) the recognition of the skills and capacities of individuals. Moreover, it considers the implications of those pathways for the reproduction of inequality before concluding with future directions for research on experts and expertise. I argue that future research on expertise would benefit from incorporating the findings from the work of scholars of racial, gender, and economic inequality to overcome the decontextualized ways in which expertise has often been explored.
... 49 The main lesson for practice is that diversity practices promoted as enhancing fairness can backfire unless organizations adopt accountability mechanisms ensuring that decisionmakers maintain their motivation to be unbiased. 50 The importance of holding managers accountable for implementing diversity practices becomes even clearer when one considers the fear and other feelings that can make managers Table 2. Actions to meet two key challenges in diversity management ...
The business case for diversity holds that diversity leads to synergy; that is, having multiple perspectives results in performance benefits, such as improvements in decisionmaking, problem-solving, creativity, and innovation. Research on diversity in teams has documented conditions under which it leads to improved performance. Current diversity management practices in organizations, however, focus more on preventing the negative effects that can follow from diversity (such as discrimination and lack of inclusion) than on how to gain the performance benefits that diversity can afford. In this article, we draw on recent reviews of the team diversity and diversity management literatures to suggest strategies likely to stimulate synergy from diversity. We conclude that diversity management practices must include actions that are designed specifically to spur teams to integrate diverse information and perspectives. In addition, such practices are most likely to enhance performance if they are deployed as part of a bundle of diversity management practices (rather than as stand-alone initiatives) and if formal human resources diversity practices are complemented both with informal diversity-supporting leadership actions and with formal accountability systems for monitoring whether practices are implemented as intended.
... Hiring processes need to be revised to reduce the risk of isolating women applicants or inducing implicit bias practices (Filut et al., 2017;Rogus-Pulia et al., 2018). Women's persistent lower annual performance rewards can be eliminated when measures of transparency and clear accountability are introduced (Castilla, 2015;Rogus-Pulia et al., 2018). ...
This research examines the extent to which issues identified in Breaking Anonymity (The Chilly Collective, 1995) are still salient despite new EDI mandates/programs which support increased research excellence through EDI principles. We present survey results for Canadian academics who identify as women (n = 244) regarding their experiences with gender-based harassment and discrimination. Our analysis identified three categories of patriarchal gendered control: (1) overt practices, (2) covert practices, and (3) a systematic effort to silence the reporting of these experiences. We highlight the voices of women academics as they provide personal insights into the continuing barriers through their experiences. Through their stories, the implications of existing overt and covert harassment and discrimination practices are discussed. Our study provides an overview of women academics' experiences with oppression by their male colleagues and contributes to research exploring equity and inclusion in higher education and the continued need to work toward gender equity.
Keywords: gender, discrimination, harassment, chilly climate, academia
... However, regularly publishing quotas assigned to all salespeople can demonstrate transparency in the quota-setting process. Prior research has found that when firms commit to transparently reporting compensation-related or financial information, they are perceived as having more equitable quota-setting processes, thereby diminishing perceptions of unfair practices (Castilla 2015). Moreover, process transparency has been shown to improve employees' perceptions of procedural fairness and reduce job distress, both of which are precursors of improved organizational commitment (SimanTov-Nachlieli and Bamberger 2021; Zheng et al. 2021). ...
Performance rankings are a widely used motivational tool in sales organizations, yet their effectiveness in influencing important salesperson outcomes remains largely underexplored. Moreover, the impact of presenting different types of information alongside rankings has not been previously investigated. This research, spanning two studies with more than 27,000 salespeople from over 170 firms representing 83 countries, directly addresses this research gap, examining the effects of three distinct information conditions: anonymized performance rankings, identifiable performance rankings, and identifiable rankings with quotas on salesperson quota attainment and turnover. The authors also examine the role of variable compensation share and ranking group size, offering nuanced insights into their moderating effects. The findings reveal that anonymous rankings, while beneficial for quota attainment, increase turnover. In contrast, identifiable rankings coupled with quotas do not significantly improve quota attainment but effectively reduce turnover. The authors find that disclosing performance rankings with salespeople's identities is the sole condition that simultaneously elevates quota attainment and reduces turnover. By delineating these nuances, this research provides new and important implications to several literature streams and equips sales managers with strategic guidance on tailoring the presentation of performance rankings to enhance critical outcomes within the specific context of their organizations.
... The following is the WarpPLS test in research that obtains results from outer model and inner model information. Aims to realize sustainable welfare and economic benefits through a balance between efforts to preserve the natural resource environment and cultural conservation and community involvement in its management (Lee, 2013) 1. Participation of local communities 2. Conservation management 3. Protection of natural areas 4. Maintain local culture 5. Regeneration of local culture and wisdom Transparency of the ability of relevant stakeholders to see and understand the processes and foundations used in decision-making or in managing the company (Parris et al., 2016) 1. Availability of documents 2. Document Accessibility 3. Clarity of information 4. Information Completeness 5. Process openness 6. Regulatory framework Accountability Disclose aspects of transparency and fairness that exist in an organization's performance (Castilla, 2015) 1. Standard Operating Procedure 2. Policy implementation 3. Annual report 4. Accountability report 5. Monitoring system 6. ...
This study reveals the collaborative governance roles in strengthening the competitive advantage of sustainable ecotourism villages with three dimensions as moderating variables. The research used an explanatory approach with research locations conducted in 50 tourist villages in Buleleng Regency, Bali Province. The research data were collected using a questionnaire with a Likert scale. Respondents in this study were village heads, BUMDES managers, pokdarwis, customary chiefs, and the community, so the research sample totaled 250 people. Data were analyzed using the Structural Equation Modeling model using WarpPLS 5.0. The research results show the transparency and accountability variables, have a positive and significant effect on sustainable ecotourism villages, while the responsibility variable shows different results. Likewise, the three dimensions of the village can moderate the effect of transparency and responsibility on sustainable ecotourism villages. In comparison, the three dimensions of the village cannot moderate the impact of accountability on sustainable ecotourism villages.
... Pay transparency provides access to more information, allowing discernment of associated fairness (Zenger, 2019). Furthermore, transparency can help reduce pay inequality, especially regarding gender (Castilla, 2015;Cullen & Pakzad-Hurson, 2017;Kim, 2015). Findings by Kim (2015) are especially encouraging as transparency benefitted college-educated women. ...
... It remains to be seen, however, what the net effect of these or other pay transparency policies will be. Do the benefits in terms of enhanced trust and informational justice (Castilla, 2015) outweigh any unfavorable comparisons facilitated by greater transparency? A growing literature on pay transparency is emerging (e.g., Alterman et al., 2021;Bamberger & Belogolovsky, 2017;SimanTov-Nachlieli & Bamberger, 2020;Wong et al., 2022), but has thus far focused on performance, turnover, and helping behaviors and not health outcomes. ...
The organizational sciences have long been interested in the effects of various compensation strategies, and on enhancing employee health. Research examining the connection between pay and health, however, remains a relative rarity. The work that has been done is scattered across disparate disciplines and lacks a unified framework for systematically exploring the effects of pay on health. We argue that greater insecurity at work, as well as rising discontent over wages and work conditions, necessitates a richer understanding of the ways in which organizational pay affects employee psychological, physiological, and behavioral health. We first conduct a comprehensive review of existing research across a broad range of disciplines, taking note of the different ways that pay is conceptualized and the impact it has on employee health. We identify critical knowledge gaps in why and when pay is related to health, noting several disciplinary trends. Drawing on prominent theories of occupational health, we then build a theoretical framework that illustrates three mechanisms underlying the effect of pay on health. We further advance prior work by integrating allostatic load theory to explain how pay gets “under the skin” to affect health, while also identifying relevant moderators and boundary conditions. Taken together, our review integrates findings from a variety of disciplines and facilitates knowledge building across these fields to generate a more comprehensive understanding of the connection between pay and health.
... For example, when organizations positioned their hiring and promotion practices as meritocratic, hiring managers were even more likely to favor a male employee over an equally qualified female employee in pay increase decisions (Castilla and Benard 2010). To overcome this type of effect, organizations can create more transparency in evaluation processes and their effects (Castilla 2015). ...
Purpose
This study aims to introduce a conceptual framework that links gender microaggressive experiences at the workplace to women’s propensity to quiet quit.
Design/methodology/approach
Using conservation of resources theory and social exchange theory this study develops a conceptual framework to explain women employees’ quiet quitting (QQ) behaviour when they experience gender microaggressions (GM) in workplaces.
Findings
The conceptual framework provides a comprehensive understating of antecedents to QQ behaviour of women employees. Affective commitment is identified to mediate and supervisory support to moderate the relationship between QQ and GM.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the QQ process through a gendered lens.
To explore the effectiveness of behavioral policy interventions on workplace inequality, we focus on four categories of interventions: affirmative action practices, targeted human resource management, diversity training, and accountability and transparency practices. We assess the impact of each of these approaches on improving employment outcomes for women and underrepresented minorities, and we highlight the approaches’ key design features. On the basis of this review, we offer recommendations for developing and implementing organizational policies and practices to increase workforce diversity and career growth at all levels and to decrease discrimination in the workplace. We also suggest directions for researchers, organizations, policymakers, and regulatory bodies to pursue.
This paper investigates how having more White coworkers influences the subsequent retention and promotion of Black women relative to other race-gender groups. Studying 9,037 new hires at a professional services firm, we first document large racial turnover and promotion gaps: Even after controlling for observable characteristics, Black employees are 6.7 percentage points (32%) more likely to turn over within two years and 18.7 percentage points (26%) less likely to be promoted on time than their White counterparts. The largest turnover gap is between Black and White women, at 8.9 percentage points (51%). We argue that initial assignment to project teams is conditionally random based on placebo tests and qualitative evidence. Under this assumption, we show that a one-standard-deviation (20.8 percentage points) increase in the share of White coworkers is associated with a 15.8-percentage-point increase in turnover and an 11.5-percentage-point decrease in promotion for Black women. We refer to these effects as intersectional: Black women are the only race-gender group whose turnover and promotion are negatively impacted by White coworkers. We explore potential causal pathways through which these peer effects may emerge: Black women who were initially assigned to Whiter teams are subsequently more likely to be labeled as low performers and report fewer billable hours, both of which are predictors of higher turnover and lower promotion for all employees. Our findings contribute to the literature on peer effects, intersectionality, and the practice of managing race and gender inequality in organizations.
This paper was accepted by Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, organizations.
Funding: The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership at University of California, Berkeley-Haas, Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, and the Hub for Equal Representation at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.02010 .
Remote work has dramatically transformed professional environments, sparking considerable scholarly interest in its impact on employees and organizations. Contributing to this burgeoning literature, we investigate how remote versus on-site work affects women’s experiences of gender discrimination. Given that work location can alter the gendered nature of interactions, we focus on everyday gender discrimination: slights and offenses that occur in interactions and are perceived by recipients as reflecting gender bias. Integrating gender frame theory and scholarship on virtual work, we argue that the gender frame tends to be less salient in remote settings. Thus, we predict that women experience less everyday gender discrimination when working remotely than on-site. Moreover, because the gender frame is likely to be more salient during on-site work for younger women and those who work with mostly men, we expect that these women experience a particularly pronounced reduction in everyday gender discrimination when working remotely. To test these predictions, we developed a new measure of everyday gender discrimination and conducted an original survey of 1,091 professional women who work in the same job both remotely and on-site. We find that women consistently report less everyday gender discrimination in remote versus on-site work. This effect is particularly pronounced for younger women and those who interact mainly with men. Overall, this study advances research on how work location shapes workers’ outcomes and experiences, enriches the literature on the trade-offs women face in virtual and on-site settings, and extends scholarship on the contextual factors shaping workplace discrimination.
Funding: This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Grant 435-2020-0059], the Canada Research Chairs Program, and the Institute for Pandemics and the Institute for Gender and the Economy at the University of Toronto.
Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.16949 .
This chapter investigates the unique challenges faced by Women of Color (WOC) in professional environments through the lens of intersectional invisibility and the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model. Intersectional invisibility highlights the compounded marginalization experienced by WOC, leading to both hypervisibility and invisibility in the workplace. The chapter delves into the psychological and physical impacts of increased job demands, such as microaggressions and selective incivility, and their effects on mental health, stress, and burnout. It explores strategies for WOC to mitigate these demands and emphasizes the crucial role of organizational support, including inclusive leadership, equitable policies, and supportive work environments. The significance of mentorship and networking opportunities for career advancement is also discussed. The chapter concludes with practical implications for organizations and future research directions, advocating for systemic changes to foster more inclusive and equitable workplaces.
Research on the influence of internal and external stakeholders on diversity outcomes within organizations has grown in the past decade. Across multiple macro and micro theoretical domains, this body of research has examined various diversity outcomes at different organizational levels. Through an integrative review of literature from management, sociology, psychology, and entrepreneurship, we highlight the channels and pathways of influence and the underlying mechanisms through which four major stakeholder groups—organizational actors, resource exchange partners, institutional actors, and societal forces—impact diversity outcomes in organizations. We discuss future research directions, empirical and conceptual, and present a promising path for future studies to unpack the complex relationships between stakeholders and organizations regarding diversity issues, particularly at the intersection of multiple stakeholders and diversity aspects.
Organizations play a central role in replicating societal inequalities. Despite theories of gendered and racialized organizations, evidence of unequal outcomes, and research on proposed mechanisms, we have few intersectional analyses demonstrating how the promotion process varies by race and gender across job levels in actual organizations. In this first-ever analysis of advancement in a U.S. firm by gender, race, and job, we run random effects logistic regression models on five years of novel longitudinal data from the software engineering workforce of a U.S.-based technology company. Results show intersectional performance-reward bias in patterns that help maintain the racialized gendered hierarchy so commonly observed in organizations: White men overrepresented at the top, women of color overrepresented at the bottom, and in the technology sector, men of Asian descent overrepresented in midlevel technical jobs and White women overrepresented in midlevel management positions. Findings suggest monitoring promotions by gender, race, and position to make visible biases that continue to impede workplace equity.
Purpose
This paper examines the efforts of National Health Service (England) (NHSE) to respond to employee-based racial inequalities via its Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES). The WRES constitutes a hybridised accountability initiative with characteristics of the moral and imposed regimes of accountability.
Design/methodology/approach
The study conceptualises the notion of responsive race accountability with recourse to Favotto et al .’s (2022) moral accountability model and critical race theory (CRT), and through it, examines the enactment of WRES at 40 NHSE trusts using qualitative content analysis.
Findings
Despite the progressive nature of the WRES that seeks to nurture corrective actions, results suggest that trusts tend to adopt an instrumental approach to the exercise. Whilst there is some evidence of good practice, the instrumental approach prevails across both the metric reporting that trusts engage in to guide their actions, and the planned actions for progress. These planned actions not only often fail to coalesce with the trust-specific data but also include generic NHSE or equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives and mimetic adoptions of best practice guidance that only superficially address racial concerns.
Social implications
Whilst the WRES is a laudable voluntary achievement, its moral imperative does not appear to have translated into a moral accountability within individual trusts.
Originality/value
Responding to calls for more research at the accounting-race nexus, this study uniquely draws on CRT to conceptualise and examine race accountability.
This paper aims to examine the impact of financial, accounting and auditing practices on workplace inequalities. Workplace inequalities can take various forms, such as wage differentials, discrimination, and opportunities for advancement. In this framework, the potential of financial, accounting and auditing practices to maintain or reduce these disparities will be explored. In this study, the discussion of strategies for the importance of financial, accounting and auditing practices in addressing workplace inequalities is based on a literature review. By emphasizing the importance of these practices in addressing workplace inequalities, it aims to provide a basis for future research and practice. Scientific publications, articles, books and reports obtained with the keywords identified in the research were systematically analyzed.
Academic interest in reducing discrimination has produced substantial research testing interventions to mitigate biased outcomes. However, disparate findings and a scarcity of studies examining work-related behavioral measures make it challenging to determine which interventions are better suited to reduce workplace discrimination. Derived from the tripartite theory of attitudes and the principle of compatibility, I develop a conceptual model mapping the attitude focus of interventions and code studies in this literature from the past two decades for these common properties. Based on a meta-analysis of 70 articles totaling 208 effect sizes, I test this conceptual model, finding that it helps explain why some interventions to reduce discrimination yield superior outcomes relative to others. In particular, results indicate that passive interventions, such as short-term education or reminders of bias processes, are largely ineffective in shifting behavior. Conversely, the class of interventions that targets behavior directly by attempting to inhibit the manifestation of bias (e.g., making individuals accountable for their decisions or changing social norms) emerged as the most helpful category of interventions in this area. Overall, results support a key prediction of the attitude dimension consistency perspective, demonstrating that aligning the attitude dimension primarily targeted by an intervention and the outcome measured could lead to improved results in this area.
Gender bias is widely recognized as having negative effects on women in business, including on outcomes such as hiring, promotion, pay, and access to venture capital funding. This study identifies a strategy that women business owners can employ to boost business outcomes. Across five preregistered studies (N = 2585), including a field study, affixing the owner attribute label “woman-owned business” can engender positive business outcomes, including perceptions of business competence and service quality (studies 1 and 2). These effects are driven by an increase in perceptions of the business owner’s agency (study 3). Affixing a gender-based owner attribute label is especially effective in situations that lack other credible cues of competence (study 4) and in industries that are perceived as difficult to succeed in (study 5). The present work advances our understanding of stereotypes, discrimination, and identity in the consumer marketplace, and it offers practical implications for business owners in traditionally marginalized groups who face—and must combat—stereotypes.
Performance rankings are a widely used motivational tool in sales organizations, yet their effectiveness in influencing important salesperson outcomes remains largely underexplored. Moreover, the impact of presenting different types of information alongside rankings has not been previously investigated. This research, spanning two studies with more than 27,000 salespeople from over 170 firms representing 83 countries, directly addresses this research gap, examining the effects of three distinct information conditions: anonymized performance rankings, identifiable performance rankings, and identifiable rankings with quotas on salesperson quota attainment and turnover. The authors also examine the role of variable compensation share and ranking group size, offering nuanced insights into their moderating effects. The findings reveal that anonymous rankings, while beneficial for quota attainment, increase turnover. In contrast, identifiable rankings coupled with quotas do not significantly improve quota attainment but effectively reduce turnover. The authors find that disclosing performance rankings with salespeople's identities is the sole condition that simultaneously elevates quota attainment and reduces turnover. By delineating these nuances, this research provides new and important implications to several literature streams and equips sales managers with strategic guidance on tailoring the presentation of performance rankings to enhance critical outcomes within the specific context of their organizations.
Existing research shows that tenants are disadvantaged in eviction proceedings, but studies have provided an incomplete account of the way court procedures and practices work together to produce systematic disadvantage. We draw on legal aid attorneys’ accounts of eviction hearings—particularly how courts establish whether and how much rent is owed—to show how hearings routinely result in judgments in favor of plaintiffs even when tenants have a legal defense. We argue that there is a hierarchy of credibility in how courts evaluate landlords’ claims for possession of a rental property due to nonpayment of rent. In demonstrating the way legal claims are embedded within and shaped by wider courthouse practices, the study highlights the importance of legal representation for tenants facing eviction and suggests that courts play a role in the maintenance of exploitative rental markets by failing to penalize landlords for inaccurate charges.
Existing theory suggests that professionals are ineffective at regulating the work of their peers, especially when it comes to disciplining misconduct, because of professional norms of collegiality. In response, transparency measures have been put in place over the years to increase accountability toward key external audiences, such as the public, and to ensure that professionals hold guilty peers accountable for misconduct. Few studies, however, have sufficiently investigated how professionals discipline peer misconduct in the face of transparency measures. We gained access to a state medical board’s internal deliberations about how to discipline physicians guilty of overprescribing opioids, endangering public health. We found that even in the most egregious cases, the board predominantly refrained from implementing stringent disciplinary action despite extensive transparency measures. Our data allow us to theorize what we call bounded accountability, which refers to individuals charged with holding guilty actors accountable for their misconduct instituting only limited discipline. We found four mechanisms that constrained the exercise of accountability: information asymmetries between regulatory bodies, bureaucratic inefficiencies of the disciplinary apparatus, shared professional beliefs among decision makers, and interpersonal emotions between decision makers and the guilty professionals who are put in charge of disciplining. We found that these mechanisms operated at the field, occupational, organizational, and interpersonal levels, respectively. Utilizing a highly consequential study context, our findings suggest that when professional misconduct is disciplined by members of the same occupation, bounded accountability is the most likely outcome, even with extensive transparency measures in place.
Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17932 .
White, male-dominated professions in the United States are marked with substantial gender and racial inequality in career advancement, yet they often face pressures to increase diversity. In these contexts, are theories of employer biases based on gender and racial stereotypes sufficient to explain patterns of hiring discrimination during common career transitions in the external labor market? If not, how and why do discrimination patterns deviate from predictions? Through a case study of software engineering, we first draw from a large-scale audit study and demonstrate unexpected patterns of hiring screening discrimination: while employers discriminate in favor of White men among early-career job applicants seeking lateral positions, for both early-career and senior workers applying to senior jobs, Black men and Black women face no discrimination compared to White men, and White women are preferred. Drawing on in-depth interviews, we explain these patterns of discrimination by demonstrating how decision-makers incorporate diversity value—applicants’ perceived worth for their contribution to organizational diversity—into hiring screening decisions, alongside biases. We introduce diversity commodification as the market-based valuative process by which diversity value varies across job level and intersectional groups. This article offers important implications for our understanding of gender, race, and employer decision-making in modern U.S. organizations.
This study investigates the impact of a pay transparency intervention in reducing the gender pay gap in the UK university sector. Introduced in 2007, the initiative enabled public access to average annual earnings disaggregated by gender in UK universities. We use a detailed matched employee‐employer administrative dataset that follows individuals over time, allowing us to adopt a quasi‐experimental approach based on event studies around the intervention. We find that the earnings of female academics increased by around 0.62 percentage points compared to their male counterparts as the control group, whose earnings remained constant after the pay transparency intervention, reducing the gender pay gap by 4.37 per cent. Further evidence suggests that the main mechanism for the fall in the pay gap is driven by female employees negotiating higher wages, particularly among senior female academics.
Organizational scholars highlight challenges in reducing inequality within organizations. Due to unanticipated consequences, many programs launched by organizations fail to accomplish these goals. We leverage historical data from the Dutch East India Company to claim that training programs may be an effective tool against inequality when coupled with teamwork incentives and included in broader programs for change. We study the effects of these programs on the unequal promotion rates between Dutchmen and non-Dutchmen across periods of time in which those programs were offered and in which they were not. Our analyses of promotions to top-ranked positions on the Company’s ships suggest a two-fold conclusion: first, the introduction of leadership training and teamwork incentives reduced the differential weights given to the experience of Dutchmen and non-Dutchmen; and, second, those benefits disappeared when the policies were rescinded after a change in top leadership. The results underscore the opportunities and difficulties that organizations face in implementing durable interventions against inequality.
The trickle‐down effect has been proposed as one means to address women's continued underrepresentation in leadership positions globally. While earlier research supported the trickle‐down effect's prediction that increasing women's representation at higher managerial levels will positively impact women's careers at lower managerial levels, recent studies provide inconsistent evidence, leading to claims that it may be spurious. Due to data limitation, most prior trickle‐down research has explored just two managerial levels—board and executives—making it difficult to separate a trickle‐down effect from external pressures (e.g., shareholders, law) or internal factors (e.g., organizational culture) that may cause it. Furthermore, prior research does not adequately account for women's representation in managerial pipelines, a crucial source of potential managerial talent. To address these concerns, we analyze Australian workplace panel data (2014–2020) that allow for a more robust test of the trickle‐down effect than previously examined. Our results support the trickle‐down effect across multiple managerial levels below the board level, independent of managerial pipeline effects. The trickle‐down and pipeline effects were only observed for positions immediately above and below each managerial level. This highlights the proximity of positions within management hierarchies where the in‐group preference and women's direct advocacy for other women are most likely to occur. Our study suggests that simply appointing more women to top positions, such as boards, while beneficial, is not enough to address gender inequality in management meaningfully. We recommend that rather than focusing on gender representation at the top, organizations should set gender diversity goals and monitor progress at all managerial levels. We conclude with implications for theory, practice, and future research.
We present a conceptual framework of situational moderators of gender/sex effects in negotiation, risk-taking, and leadership—three masculine-stereotypic domains associated with gender/sex gaps in pay and authority. We propose that greater situational ambiguity and higher relevance and salience of gender/sex increase the likelihood of gender/sex-linked behaviors in these domains. We argue that greater ambiguity increases the extent to which actors and audiences must search inwardly (e.g., mental schema, past experience) or outwardly (e.g., social norms) for cues on how to behave or evaluate a situation and thereby widens the door for gender/sex-linked influences. Correspondingly, we propose that gender/sex effects on behavior and evaluations in these domains will be more likely when gender/sex is more relevant and salient to the setting or task. We propose further that these two situational moderators may work jointly or interactively to influence the likelihood of gender/sex effects in negotiation, risk-taking, and leadership. We conclude by discussing applications of our conceptual framework to psychological science and its translation to practice, including directions for future research.
Responding to persistent gender inequity, organizations have adopted diversity initiatives to promote women’s representation in traditionally male-dominated occupations. Although studies have identified challenges to these initiatives for women entering occupations, we uncover a performance recognition penalty for incumbent workers originating from the process of occupational diversification. As women incrementally enter a male-dominated occupation, a conflict arises between the changing gender composition at the work-unit level and the masculine “ideal worker” prototype embedded in the occupation. We propose that this conflict will lower the performance expectations of the work unit, decreasing the individual likelihood of performance recognition for each worker in the unit. Using detailed panel data on police officers, we found that an officer’s individual likelihood of being nominated for a performance award consistently declined when their police unit proportionately increased in women officers. Both men and women managers enacted this penalty, with men managers penalizing men subordinates more than women subordinates. This pattern remained for awards recognizing exceptional performance, regardless of gender-typing of the unit or its work tasks, and considering officer tenure and attrition from the unit. Our findings offer novel insights into the challenge of diversifying male-dominated occupations.
Despite important advances, gender-based discrimination continues to hinder women's career progress. This review examines the role that gender stereotypes play in promoting gender bias and discrimination. After reviewing what is known about the content of gender stereotypes and examining both their descriptive and prescriptive aspects, we discuss two pathways through which stereotypes result in discrepant work outcomes for women and men. First, we consider how the characterization of women as communal conflicts with the perceived demands of many male gender-typed jobs and fields, thus promoting perceptions of women's incompetence in those areas. Second, we consider how norms about how women should and should not behave cause women to incur penalties when they exhibit counter-stereotypical attributes and behaviors at work. Our review further focuses on the conditions that foster or undercut gender bias and discrimination and uses this knowledge as a foundation for proposing strategies to promote more egalitarian organizational processes.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, Volume 11 is January 2024. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Stereotypes may influence judgment via assimilation, such that individual group members are evaluated consistently with stereotypes, or via contrast, such that targets are displaced from the overall group expectation. Two models of judgment—the shifting standards model and status characteristics theory—provide some insight into predicting and interpreting these apparently contradictory effects. In 2 studies involving a simulated applicant-evaluation setting, we predicted and found that participants set lower minimum-competency standards, but higher ability standards, for female than for male and for Black than for White applicants. Thus, although it may be easier for low- than high-status group members to meet (low) standards, these same people must work harder to prove that their performance is ability based.
This experiment tested predictions derived from a social contingency model of judgment and choice that identifies 3 distinctive strategies that people rely on in dealing with demands for accountability from important interpersonal or institutional audiences. The model predicts that (a) when people know the views of the audience and are unconstrained by past commitments, they will rely on the low-effort acceptability heuristic and simply shift their views toward those of the prospective audience, (b) when people do not know the views of the audience and are unconstrained by past commitments, they will he motivated to think in relatively flexible, multidimensional ways (preemptive self-criticism), and (c) when people are accountable for positions to which they feel committed, they will devote the majority of their mental effort to justifying those positions (defensive bolstering). The experiment yielded results supportive of these 3 predictions. The study also revealed some evidence of individual differences in social and cognitive strategies for coping with accountability.
Scholars and practitioners agree that referrals provide firms with better workers. Economists and sociologists debate whether the underlying mechanism behind such relations is a better match between workers and firms or an advantage conferred by social relations. Building on insights from network theory and cognitive psychology, we offer a new approach to the debate, arguing that network relations can also create evaluative bias. We reexamine the connection between social ties and workers' performance using unique data on the actual productivity of sales employees and their evaluations in a large global firm. Results suggest that the preexistence of ties between an incoming employee and insiders in the firm creates an evaluative advantage-an advantage that is unrelated to workers' concrete performance. We discuss the implications of these results for a relational approach to social stratification, organizations and work, as well as social networks.
Equal opportunity in the workplace is thought to be the direct legacy of the civil rights and feminist movements and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet, as Frank Dobbin demonstrates, corporate personnel experts--not Congress or the courts--were the ones who determined what equal opportunity meant in practice, designing changes in how employers hire, promote, and fire workers, and ultimately defining what discrimination is, and is not, in the American imagination. Dobbin shows how Congress and the courts merely endorsed programs devised by corporate personnel. He traces how the first measures were adopted by military contractors worried that the Kennedy administration would cancel their contracts if they didn't take "affirmative action" to end discrimination. These measures built on existing personnel programs, many designed to prevent bias against unionists. Dobbin follows the changes in the law as personnel experts invented one wave after another of equal opportunity programs. He examines how corporate personnel formalized hiring and promotion practices in the 1970s to eradicate bias by managers; how in the 1980s they answered Ronald Reagan's threat to end affirmative action by recasting their efforts as diversity-management programs; and how the growing presence of women in the newly named human resources profession has contributed to a focus on sexual harassment and work/life issues. Inventing Equal Opportunity reveals how the personnel profession devised--and ultimately transformed--our understanding of discrimination.
This article analyzes organizational mechanisms, and their contexts, leading to gender inequality among stockbrokers in two large brokerages. Inequality is the result of gender differences in sales, as both firms use performance-based pay, paying entirely by commissions. This article develops and tests whether performance-support bias, whereby women receive inferior sales support and sales assignments, causes the commissions gap. Newly available data on the brokerages' internal transfers of accounts among brokers allows measurement of performance-support bias. Gender differences in the quality and quantity of transferred accounts provide a way to measure gender differences in the assignment of sales opportunities and support. Sales generated from internally transferred accounts, controlling for the accounts' sales histories, provide a "natural experiment" testing for gender differences in sales capacities. The evidence for performance-support bias is (1) women are assigned inferior accounts and (2) women produce sales equivalent to men when given accounts with equivalent prior sales histories.
This study shows that the organization of work, particularly the
structure of jobs, can sustain or erode gender and racial disadvantage. Restructuring work around team work and weaker job boundaries can improve women’s and minorities’ visibility and reduce
stereotyping and thus should reduce their career disadvantage. Proponents of bureaucratic formalization argue, in contrast, that relaxing formal job definitions and emphasizing social relations at work
will deepen ascriptive disadvantage. The reorganization of work in
corporate America over the last two decades provides a test case.
Using unique data on the life histories of more than 800 organizations, the author examines whether alleviating job segregation
leads to better career outcomes for women and minorities. This study
finds that when employers adopt popular team and training programs that increase cross-functional collaboration, ascriptive inequality declines. Similar programs that do not transcend job boundaries do not lead to such increases. The results point to different
effects at the intersection of gender and race.
The authors study the effect of unionization on gender wage differentials for production workers in nine U.S. manufacturing industries. They find that the wage gap is significantly smaller in unionized establishments for six of the industries, even after controlling for occupation and establishment gender composition. But this union effect does not hold within three industries. The authors conclude that unionization generally reduces wage inequality between blue-collar men and women, but the effect might be contingent both on the overall proportion of women in an industry and on union characteristics. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for income inequality and union policies.
Gender disparities in wages and attainment caused by employer discrimination can come about by three very different processes: allocative discrimination, within-job wage discrimination, and valuative discrimination. For the United States, it has been established that within-job wage discrimination no longer is a major source of wage differences, while valuative discrimination potentially is. Less known is the role of allocative discrimination, especially in the hiring process, which we identify as the point where discrimination is most feasible. Our analysis uses personnel data on all entrants into a large U.S. service organization in the period 1978-86, focusing on managerial, administrative, and professional employees. We study the placement at initial hire and then follow job levels, wages, promotions, as well as departures, in years subsequent to hire.
Drawing on neoclassical economic, internal labor market, and devaluation theories, we examine how the sex composition of jobs and the sex of individual workers affect earnings, depending upon the formalization of the pay type. Using personnel data for over 8,000 employees, we confirm the existence of a negative relationship between earnings and the proportion female in a job. We also find that for less-formalized pay types (cash incentive bonuses), sex-composition and individual-sex effects are larger than for more formalized pay (merit raises and base salary). Together, these findings support devaluation explanations, suggest that incentive bonuses may widen the earnings gap between women and men, and have implications for the design of pay structures in organizations.
This article examines the effect of legal environments on the expansion of due process in organizational governance. Event-history analyses of personnel practices in 52 organizations show that the civil rights mandates of the 1960s created a normative environment that threatened the legitimacy of arbitrary organizational governance. This precipitated a diffusion of formal grievance procedures for nonunion employees. Proximity to the public sphere, number of employees, and structural differentiation of the personnel function rendered organizations more vulnerable to normative pressure. Variation along these dimensions explains variations in the rates of rights expansion across organizations.
Using a study on foundings of Silicon Valley law firms, I propose and test an organizational theory on the genealogical persistence of gender inequality that emphasizes the routines (or blueprints) and experiences that founders transfer from their parent firms to their new firms. This transfer links the parent firm's gender hierarchy to women's advancement opportunities in the new firm. Founders from parent firms that historically had women in leadership positions, such that female leadership is institutionalized, are more likely to found firms that promote women into prominent positions. Conversely, founders from firms that historically had women in subordinate positions, such that female subordination is institutionalized, are less likely to promote women into prominent positions. Findings are consistent with the theory and also show that the persistence effect is stronger for founders who were previously lower-ranked employees and for founders who institute an organization of work similar to their parent firm. The study suggests that future research should investigate routines and structures that not only generate gender inequality unintentionally but are in turn replicated across generations of organization through the mobility of employees.
Employers have experimented with three broad approaches to promoting diversity. Some programs are designed to establish organizational responsibility for diversity, others to moderate managerial bias through training and feedback, and still others to reduce the social isolation of women and minority workers. These approaches find support in academic theories of how organizations achieve goals, how stereotyping shapes hiring and promotion, and how networks influence careers. This is the first systematic analysis of their efficacy. The analyses rely on federal data describing the workforces of 708 private sector establishments from 1971 to 2002, coupled with survey data on their employment practices. Efforts to moderate managerial bias through diversity training and diversity evaluations are least effective at increasing the share of white women, black women, and black men in management. Efforts to attack social isolation through mentoring and networking show modest effects. Efforts to establish responsibility for diversity lead to the broadest increases in managerial diversity. Moreover, organizations that establish responsibility see better effects from diversity training and evaluations, networking, and mentoring. Employers subject to federal affirmative action edicts, who typically assign responsibility for compliance to a manager, also see stronger effects from some programs. This work lays the foundation for an institutional theory of the remediation of workplace inequality.
Tested hypotheses derived from 3 explanations of the consistent differences in the ways men and women allocate rewards between themselves and others. 71 male and 71 female introductory psychology students who had scored either high or low on an Interpersonal Orientation (IO) Scale allocated monetary rewards between themselves and a same-sex partner with inferior performance. Allocations were either public or private, and future interaction with the partner either was or was not expected. Contrary to the IO explanation, women allocated rewards more equally than men did despite the fact that men and women were equivalent in their degree of interpersonal orientation. High-IO individuals allocated rewards more equally than did low-IO individuals but only in private. Contrary to the self-presentational explanation, both women and men allocated rewards more equally when allocations were public than when they were private and when future interaction was expected than when it was not. Contrary to the cognitive explanation, few gender differences in performance expectations, evaluations, or attributions were observed, and these factors were unrelated to reward allocations. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Using an in-basket exercise, we examined the pay allocations of 117 bank managers when dependence on subordinate expertise, dependency threats in the form of a pay demand, and pay secrecy were systematically varied. Results supported expectations that dependency threats would lead to higher pay raises in the high dependence but not in the low dependence condition. Because we used an alpha level of .05, the prediction that these effects would be enhanced under conditions of pay secrecy was not significant; however, because
p = .07 for the pay secrecy condition, a second study was conducted to further explore the pay secrecy issue. This second study, involving a separate sample of 120 bank managers, assessed the possibility that pay secrecy would have the expected enhancing effect when the study situation incorporated visible, potentially negative consequences for the pay allocator if pay raises were influenced by dependence and dependency threats. Contrary to expectations, high dependence and high dependency threats had the anticipated positive effects on the pay allocations only when pay was open. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Explored the impact of accountability (the need to justify one's views to others) on the complexity of people's thinking on controversial social issues. 48 undergraduates reported their thoughts on 3 issues and then responded to a series of attitude scales relevant to each topic. Ss provided this information under 1 of 4 conditions: expecting their attitudes to be anonymous or expecting to justify their attitudes to an individual with liberal, conservative, or unknown views. Consistent with previous work on strategic attitude shifts, Ss reported more liberal attitudes when they expected to justify their views to a conservative. Accountability also increased the integrative complexity and evaluative inconsistency of the thoughts reported on each issue but only when Ss expected to justify their attitudes to an individual with unknown views. Findings suggest that accountability leads to more complex information processing only when people do not have the cognitively lazy option of simply expressing views similar to those of the individual to whom they feel accountable. (39 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Debates about globalization have centered on calls to improve accountability to limit abuses of power in world politics. How should we think about global accountability in the absence of global democracy? Who should hold whom to account and according to what standards? Thinking clearly about these questions requires recognizing a distinction, evident in theories of accountability at the nation-state level, between “participation” and “delegation” models of accountability. The distinction helps to explain why accountability is so problematic at the global level and to clarify alternative possibilities for pragmatic improvements in accountability mechanisms globally. We identify seven types of accountability mechanisms and consider their applicability to states, NGOs, multilateral organizations, multinational corporations, and transgovernmental networks. By disaggregating the problem in this way, we hope to identify opportunities for improving protections against abuses of power at the global level.
A definition is given of partial likelihood generalizing the ideas of conditional and marginal likelihood. Applications include life tables and inference in stochastic processes. It is shown that the usual large-sample properties of maximum likelihood estimates and tests apply when partial likelihood is used.
Recent research shows that women faculty members in academia continue to face systemic barriers to opportunity and advancement and that these barriers are particularly strong in science and engineering, and in university administration. University administrators and faculty members, however, have been slow to recognize that systemically gendered barriers will have to be reduced or eliminated in order for women faculty to advance in their careers. One key problem is that many, if not most, leaders in powerful decision-making roles in universities continue to embrace women-centred explanations for gender disparities in advancement through the academic ranks. University leaders' lack of recognition of institutionalized gender barriers suggests the need for greater dissemination of research findings (and training) about how systemic barriers operate and why these barriers disproportionately disadvantage women. In this article I first theorize universities as incongruous, gendered bureaucratic structures. I then outline an intervention strategy for enabling university faculty members and administrators to see incongruous, gendered bureaucratic structures and to then use this knowledge to develop strategies for addressing the problem of women's underrepresentation among science and engineering faculty. The strategy described is a case-study approach recently implemented at a mid-sized research-intensive university in the US Midwest. The workshop was part of a broader university programme aimed at transforming the university's cultures, practices and structures in ways that help to enhance the recruitment, retention and promotion of women scientists. I conclude by discussing the benefits and limitations of the case-study approach as a method for unsettling accepted knowledge about the gendered structures and normative practices of the university.
Gender inequality in interaction takes many forms and is maintained by various processes. For example, men and women frequently differ in the amount of competence that is assigned to them and in the emotional reactions they receive when they attempt to occupy leadership positions. Moreover, women who do achieve such positions often have difficulties exerting influence. For instance, they tend to be perceived as aggressive whereas men exhibiting the same behavior are seen as decisive. In addition, there are usually differences in the types of personality characteristics that men and women are expected to exhibit (e.g., women are expected to be more sensitive than men). There are also gender differences in the rules specifying what degree of informality is acceptable in a given situation.
There are approximately 150 million people of African descent in Latin America yet Afro-descendants have been consistently marginalized as undesirable elements of the society. Latin America has nevertheless long prided itself on its absence of U.S.-styled state-mandated Jim Crow racial segregation laws. This book disrupts the traditional narrative of Latin America’s legally benign racial past by comprehensively examining the existence of customary laws of racial regulation and the historic complicity of Latin American states in erecting and sustaining racial hierarchies. Tanya Katerí Hernández is the first author to consider the salience of the customary law of race regulation for the contemporary development of racial equality laws across the region. Therefore, the book has a particular relevance for the contemporary U.S. racial context in which Jim Crow laws have long been abolished and a “post-racial” rhetoric undermines the commitment to racial equality laws and policies amidst a backdrop of continued inequality.
This study contributes to the labor market inequality and organizations literature by investigating the role that government agents play in shaping the employment of immigrants. Using unique data on applications for immigrant permanent labor certification evaluated by U.S. Department of Labor agents, we assess to what extent immigrants of select citizenship groups experience disparities in the labor certification process—one critical stage of the work authorization system leading to the granting of most employment-based green cards. Despite current U.S. laws that forbid discrimination on the basis of nationality, we find that labor certification approvals differ significantly depending on immigrants’ foreign citizenship, even after controlling for key factors. Additionally, because of the U.S. government’s unique process of auditing applications, we are in a rare position to empirically distinguish between statistical and preference-based accounts of labor market discrimination in the labor certification process. In support of the statistical account, we find that certification approvals are equally likely for immigrant workers from the vast majority of citizenship groups when agents review audited applications with detailed employment information. This article concludes by discussing the implications of our results for addressing disparities in the employment of foreign nationals.
Scholars and pundits argue that women and minorities are more likely to lose their jobs in downsizing because of segregation or outright discrimination. In contrast, this article explores how the formalization and legalization of downsizing affect inequalities. According to bureaucracy theory and management practitioners, formalization constrains decision-makers’ bias, but neo-structural and feminist theories of inequality argue that formalization can itself be gendered and racially biased. Accountability theory advances this debate, pointing to organizational and institutional processes that motivate executives to minimize inequality. Building on these theories, and drawing on unique data from a national sample of 327 downsized establishments between 1971 and 2002, I analyze how layoff formalization and actors’ antidiscrimination accountability affect women’s and minorities’ representation in management after downsizing. Results demonstrate that, first, downsizing significantly reduces managerial diversity. Second, formalization exacerbates these negative effects when layoff rules rely on positions or tenure, but not when layoff rules require an individualized evaluation. Finally, antidiscrimination accountability generated by internal legal counsels or compliance awareness prods executives to override formal rules and reduce inequalities. I conclude that although downsizing has been increasingly managed by formal rules and monitored by legal experts, this has often meant the institutionalization of unequal, rather than equal, opportunity.
Much research in sociology and labor economics studies proxies for productivity; consequently, little is known about the relationship between personal contacts and worker performance. This study addresses, for the first time, the role of referral contacts on workers' performance. Using employees' hiring and performance data in a call center, the author examines the performance implications over time of hiring new workers via employee referrals. When assessing whether referrals are more productive than nonreferrals, the author also considers the relationship between employee productivity and turnover. This study finds that referrals are initially more productive than nonreferrals, but longitudinal analyses emphasize posthire social processes among socially connected employees. This article demonstrates that the effect of referral ties continues beyond the hiring process, having long-term effects on employee attachment to the firm and on performance.
Previous research indicates that our initial impressions of events frequently influence how we interpret later information. This experiment explored whether accountability-pressures to justify one's impressions to others-leads people to process information more vigilantly and, as a result, reduces the undue influence of early-formed impressions on final judgments. Subjects viewed evidence from a criminal case and then assessed the guilt of the defendant. The study varied (1) the order of presentation of pro-vs. anti-defendant information, (2) whether subjects expected to justify their decisions and, if so, whether subjects realized that they were accountable prior to or only after viewing the evidence. The results indicated that subjects given the anti/pro-defendant order of information were more likely to perceive the defendant as guilty than subjects given the pro/anti-defendant order of information, but only when subjects did not expect to justify their decisions or expected to justify their decisions only after viewing the evidence. Order of presentation of evidence had no impact when subjects expected to justify their decisions before viewing the evidence. Accountability prior to the evidence evidence also substantially improved free recall of the case material. The results suggest that accountability reduces primacy effects by affecting how people initially encode and process stimulus information.
Pay secrecy is a contentious issue in many organizations and a controversial one in our society. However, there has been little scholarly research on this topic. We hope to address this void by exposing the complexity of pay secrecy as a construct. What are its costs and benefits? What factors affect the link between pay secrecy and the extent to which it is a cost or benefit? This article reveals the complexity of pay secrecy and, we hope, generates ideas for much new research in the broad management field.
Research demonstrates that sex or gender remains a powerful basis of inequality in the expectations and behavior of men and women in mixed-sex task groups. Drawing upon the work of Epstein (1970) and the theoretical apparatus of status characteristics theory (see Berger et al., 1977), we explore one means by which these inequalities may be reduced--the disconfirmation of established gender-based expectations. The results of two experiments--one involving females and one involving males--show that disconfirmation does in fact reduce tasks inequality for both women and men. The results also support predictions based on the combining and attenuation principles of status characteristics theory. We interpret these findings as demonstrating that sex role socialization is (1) a manifestation of a more general status organizing process and (2) more situationally specific than has previously been assumed.
This essay examines the shift toward "structural" explanations in recent studies of inequality. After reviewing this body of research and some of its shortcomings, we examine its theoretical underpinnings, comparing "structuralist" perspectives on work organization derived from institutional economics and neo-Marxism to more orthodox accounts based on neoclassical and "industrialism" theories. This discussion suggests areas where the different perspectives overlap and diverge. We conclude that work arrangements within the firm and their trend are the focus of most "structural" perspectives on positional stratification; thus, empirical studies grounded at the organizational level are more likely to inform current debates about the "structure of work" than is the growing body of research about structural effects on individual attainment or covariation among industrial/occupational characteristics. Toward that end, an agenda for future research is outlined, focusing on three aspects of work organization: (a) the units which comprise the structure of work and the dimensions underlying economic segmentation; (b) the effects of sectoral differentiation on technical and administrative arrangements within firms; and (c) temporal changes in how enterprises organize production. We provide some illustrations of the kinds of empirical data and research hypotheses required to link research on segmentation and stratification more closely to studies of organizations.
Sociologists' principal contribution to our understanding of ascriptive inequality has been to document race and sex disparities. We have made little headway, however, in explaining these disparities because most research has sought to explain variation across ascriptive groups in more or less desirable outcomes in terms of allocators' motives. This approach has been inconclusive because motive-based theories cannot be empirically tested. Our reliance on individual-level data and the balkanization of research on ascriptive inequality into separate specialties for groups defined by different ascriptive characteristics have contributed to our explanatory stalemate. Explanation requires including mechanisms in our models-the specific processes that link groups' ascribed characteristics to variable outcomes such as earnings. I discuss mechanisms that contribute to variation in ascriptive inequality at four levels of analysis-intrapsychic, interpersonal, societal, and organizational. Redirecting our attention from motives to mechanisms is essential for understanding inequality and-equally important-for contributing meaningfully to social policies that will promote social equality.
Most research on social mobility has concentrated either on identifying the causes of status attainment or on describing a population's movement over time by means of a stochastic (usually Markov) model. Viewing mobility as a semi-Markov process suggests that the rate of mobility is a proper object of explanation, and the status attainment literature suggests substantive determinants. In particular, I argue that the rate at which a person leaves a job declines with duration in the job and depends on initial levels of job rewards, stationary and changing individual resources, and on the distribution of rewards and resources in the social system. Results from testing the proposed model with data on 1609 jobs of 456 different Chicano men support most points of the argument.
Transparency is often viewed as crucial to government accountability, but its measurement remains elusive. This concept encompasses many dimensions, which have distinct effects. In this paper, we focus on a specific dimension of transparency: governments' collection and dissemination of aggregate data. We construct a measure of this aspect of transparency, using an item response model that treats transparency as a latent predictor of the reporting of data to the World Bank's World Development Indicators. The resultant index covers 125 countries from 1980-2010. Unlike some alternatives (e.g., Freedom House), our measure -- the HRV Index -- is based on objective criteria rather than subjective expert judgments. Unlike newspaper circulation numbers, HRV reflects the dissemination of credible content -- in that it has survived the World Bank's quality control assessment. We find that HRV systematically ranks democracies as more transparent than either Freedom House or newspaper circulation figures. We argue that these differences are theoretically significant, and that HRV serves as a better predictor of government performance (1) in autocracies or (2) when the consequences of policy choices are unknown to the public. We demonstrate that HRV is a stronger predictor of a wide range of governance outcomes than is media circulation, particularly for autocratic regimes.
We study the process by which a professional service firm reshaped its activities and beliefs over nearly two decades as it adapted to shifts in the social discourse regarding gender and work. Analyzing archival data from the firm over eighteen years and representations of gender and work from the business press over the corresponding two decades, we find that the firm internalized the broader social discourse through iterated cycles of analysis and action, punctuated by evolving beliefs about gender and work. Outside experts and shifting social understandings played pivotal roles in changing beliefs and activities inside the firm. We conclude with an internalization model depicting organizational adaptation to evolving social institutions.
While great progress has been made in documenting that organizational practices affect workplace inequality, little is known about how managers in particular may shape the careers of the employees below them. Using unique longitudinal personnel data on managers and their subordinates, this study identifies and tests for evidence of three distinct mechanisms by which managers potentially influence the assessment of employee performance in the workplace: (1) social network influence between employees’ current and former managers; (2) manager–manager (horizontal) homophily; and (3) manager–employee (vertical) homophily. I find evidence of the independent effects of all three mechanisms of managerial influence on the outcome of disagreement in the performance evaluation ratings of the same worker between former and current managers. In particular, my results stress that both managerial network influence and horizontal homophily affect the process of employee performance assessments, over and above the well-studied vertical homophily mechanism. I conclude by discussing the theoretical implications of these findings for future research regarding the interactional aspects of workplace inequality within contemporary organizations.
This paper develops theory about the conditions under which cultural diversity enhances or detracts from work group functioning. From qualitative research in three culturally diverse organizations, we identified three different perspectives on workforce diversity: the integration-and-learning perspective, the access-and-legitimacy perspective, and the discrimination-and-fairness perspective. The perspective on diversity a work group held influenced how people expressed and managed tensions related to diversity, whether those who had been traditionally underrepresented in the organization felt respected and valued by their colleagues, and how people interpreted the meaning of their racial identity at work. These, in turn, had implications for how well the work group and its members functioned. All three perspectives on diversity had been successful in motivating managers to diversify their staffs, but only the integration-and-learning perspective provided the rationale and guidance needed to achieve sustained benefits from diversity. By identifying the conditions that intervene between the demographic composition of a work group and its functioning, our research helps to explain mixed results on the relationship between cultural diversity and work group outcomes.
In this article, we develop and empirically test the theoretical argument that when an organizational culture promotes meritocracy (compared with when it does not), managers in that organization may ironically show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women in translating employee performance evaluations into rewards and other key career outcomes; we call this the “paradox of meritocracy.” To assess this effect, we conducted three experiments with a total of 445 participants with managerial experience who were asked to make bonus, promotion, and termination recommendations for several employee profiles. We manipulated both the gender of the employees being evaluated and whether the company's core values emphasized meritocracy in evaluations and compensation. The main finding is consistent across the three studies: when an organization is explicitly presented as meritocratic, individuals in managerial positions favor a male employee over an equally qualified female employee by awarding him a larger monetary reward. This finding demonstrates that the pursuit of meritocracy at the workplace may be more difficult than it first appears and that there may be unrecognized risks behind certain organizational efforts used to reward merit. We discuss possible underlying mechanisms leading to the paradox of meritocracy effect as well as the scope conditions under which we expect the effect to occur.
Using data from embedded participant-observers and a field experiment at the second largest mobile phone factory in the world, located in China, I theorize and test the implications of transparent organizational design on workers’ productivity and organizational performance. Drawing from theory and research on learning and control, I introduce the notion of a transparency paradox, whereby maintaining observability of workers may counterintuitively reduce their performance by inducing those being observed to conceal their activities through codes and other costly means; conversely, creating zones of privacy may, under certain conditions, increase performance. Empirical evidence from the field shows that even a modest increase in group-level privacy sustainably and significantly improves line performance, while qualitative evidence suggests that privacy is important in supporting productive deviance, localized experimentation, distraction avoidance, and continuous improvement. I discuss implications of these results for theory on learning and control and suggest directions for future research.
An experiment examined whether accountability causes people to prefer more cautious, less risky choice alternatives. Self described high and low risk takers chose between pairs of lotteries varying in riskiness under conditions where they either would (accountable condition) or would not (unaccountable condition) have to explain and justify their decisions to others. When accountable, low risk takers became extremely risk averse, whereas high risk takers became slightly but not significantly riskier in their decisions. A second study found that high but not low risk takers admired and thought other people admired risk takers more than risk avoiders, which may explain the former's preference for risk when they are accountable. When low risk takers are accountable, caution provides relative security as well as the satisfaction that their actions are at least as admirable as if they had taken risks.
This article develops and tests hypotheses about the determinants of sex segregation in occupations employing both men and women, analyzing data on a diverse sample of California establishments. In the few instances in which men and women perform similar work roles, the jobs are typically done in distinct organizational settings, and when an enterprise employs both sexes in the same occupation, men and women are usually assigned different job titles. The findings are consistent with the theory of statistical discrimination, wich posits that employers reserve some jobs for men and others for women. However, little evidence is found that employers' practices reflect efficient and rational responses to sex differences in skills and turnover costs. Alternative explanations for gender segregation within and among organizations are suggested and the research necessary to develop a more accurate account of the sexual division of labor in the workplace is outlined.
In spite of feminist recognition that hierarchical organizations are an important location of male dominance, most feminists writing about organizations assume that organizational structure is gender neutral. This article argues that organizational structure is not gender neutral; on the contrary, assumptions about gender underlie the documents and contracts used to construct organizations and to provide the commonsense ground for theorizing about them. Their gendered nature is partly masked through obscuring the embodied nature of work. Abstract jobs and hierarchies, common concepts in organizational thinking, assume a disembodies and universal worker. This worker is actually a man; men's bodies, sexuality, and relationships to procreation and paid work are subsumed in the image of the worker. Images of men's bodies and masculinity pervade organizational processes, marginalizing women and contributing to the maintenance of gender segregation in organizations. The positing of gender-neutral and disembodied organizational structures and work relations is part of the larger strategy of control in industrial capitalist societies, which, at least partly, are built upon a deeply embedded substructure of gender difference.
In previous work we used a conceptualization of "double standards" to develop a theory explaining how similar performances may lead to different levels of attributed ability when performers belong to different status groups (e.g., gender, ethnicity). The theory predicts that the effect of double standards will be reduced when "objective" standards are presented explicitly. Using the dyadic influence paradigm from status characteristics research, we tested three hypotheses: (1) In the absence of performance information, people hold higher performance expectations for males than for females on a "male" task; (2) contradictory information on performance with explicit standards for ability cancels the effect of gender-based expectations; and (3) the size of the performance difference (magnitude of contradiction) is related to the magnitude of difference in expectations. We measured expectation advantage/disadvantage both directly and through its effect on behavior, namely rejection or acceptance of influence. The results support the hypotheses.
Previous attitude-attribution studies indicate that people are often quick to draw conclusions about the attitudes and personalities of others-even when plausible external or situational causes for behavior exist (an affect known as the overattribution effect or fundamental attribution error). This experiment explores whether accountability-pressures to justify one's causal interpretations of behavior to others-reduces or eliminates this bias. Subjects were exposed to an essay that supported or opposed affirmative action. They were informed that the essay writer had freely chosen or had been assigned the position he took. Finally, subjects either did not expect to justify their impressions of the essay writer or expected to justify their impressions either before or after exposure to the stimulus information. The results replicated previous findings when subjects did not feel accountable for their impressions of the essay writer or learned of being accountable only after viewing the stimulus information. Subjects attributed essay-consistent attitudes to the writer even when the writer had been assigned the task of advocating a particular position. Subjects were, however, significantly more sensitive to situational determinants of the essay writer's behavior when they felt accountable for their impressions prior to viewing the stimulus information. The results suggest that accountability eliminated the overattribution effect by affecting how subjects initially encoded and analyzed stimulus information.
This chapter advances to a testable middle-range theory predicated on the politician metaphor: the social contingency model of judgment and choice. This model does not map neatly in any of the traditional levels of analysis: the individual, the small group, the organization, and political system. The unit of study is the individual in relation to these social milieux. The model borrows, qualifies, and elaborates on the cognitive miser image of the thinker that has been so influential in experimental work on social cognition. The model adopts the approval and status-seeker image of human nature that has been so influential in role theory, symbolic interactionism, and impression management theory. The model draws on sociological and anthropological theory concerning the necessary conditions for social order in positing accountability to be a universal feature of natural decision environments. The social contingency model is not tightly linked to any particular methodology. The theoretical eclecticism of the model demands a corresponding commitment to methodological eclecticism. The social contingency model poses problems that cross disciplinary boundaries, and that require a plurality of methodologies. The chapter ends with considering the potential problem of proliferating metaphors in social psychological theory.
This paper proposes an extension of generalized linear models to the analysis of longitudinal data. We introduce a class of
estimating equations that give consistent estimates of the regression parameters and of their variance under mild assumptions
about the time dependence. The estimating equations are derived without specifying the joint distribution of a subject's observations
yet they reduce to the score equations for niultivariate Gaussian outcomes. Asymptotic theory is presented for the general
class of estimators. Specific cases in which we assume independence, m-dependence and exchangeable correlation structures from each subject are discussed. Efficiency of the pioposecl estimators
in two simple situations is considered. The approach is closely related to quasi-likelihood.
The analysis of censored failure times is considered. It is assumed that on each individual are available values of one or more explanatory variables. The hazard function (age‐specific failure rate) is taken to be a function of the explanatory variables and unknown regression coefficients multiplied by an arbitrary and unknown function of time. A conditional likelihood is obtained, leading to inferences about the unknown regression coefficients. Some generalizations are outlined.
We examine the effects of organizations' employment practices on sex-based ascription in managerial jobs. Given men's initial preponderance in management, we argue that inertia, sex labels, and power dynamics predispose organizations to use sex-based ascription when staffing managerial jobs, but that personnel practices can invite or curtail ascription. Our results-based on data from a national probability sample of 516 work organizations-show that specific personnel practices affect the sexual division of managerial labor. Net of controls for the composition of the labor supply, open recruitment methods are associated with women holding a greater share of management jobs, while recruitment through informal networks increases men's share. Formalizing personnel practices reduces men's share of management jobs, especially in large establishments, presumably because formalization checks ascription in job assignments, evaluation, and factors that affect attrition. Thus, through their personnel practices, establishments license or limit ascription.
This chapter reviews research on the segregation of women and men in the workplace. After examining ways to measure segregation, I summarize trends in sex segregation in the United States and cross-nationally. Occupational segregation has declined since 1970, but most workers remain in sex segregated jobs. I then evaluate the empirical support for explanations for segregation. Demand-side explanations include employers' preferences, the demand for workers, economic pressures, discrimination, and personnel practices. Supply-side explanations include the size of the labor supply, the neoclassical human-capital explanation, gender-role socialization, workers' values, and the opportunity structure. I conclude that a variety of social and economic forces operate both to perpetuate and to reduce segregation. However, workplace segregation is an important mechanism in sex stratification, and a stratification perspective stresses the importance of demand-side factors. I call for research on sex segregation that e...
This essay reviews recent theory and research on organizations and social stratification, focusing on two dimensions of inequality that are affected by organizations and their environments: (a) how rewards and opportunities vary as a function of organizational attributes and (b) how enterprises differ in their criteria for matching workers and jobs. The effects of reward structures and sorting processes on workers, organizational performance, and interorganizational relations are also considered briefly. Since many hypotheses about labor markets concern links between organizations and socioeconomic achievement, there is a need for comparative organizational research to complement analyses at the individual and aggregate levels. Moreover, the interdependence of career outcomes within and among enterprises is widely recognized but requires explicit study. Future research will benefit immeasurably from the development and testing of hypotheses about how organizations and environments influence labor market p...
The scope and meaning of ‘accountability’ has been extended in a number of directions well beyond its core sense of being called to account for one’s actions. It has been applied to internal aspects of official behaviour, beyond the external focus implied by being called to account; to institutions that control official behaviour other than through calling officials to account; to means of making officials responsive to public wishes other than through calling them to account; and to democratic dialogue between citizens where no one is being called to account. In each case the extension is readily intelligible because it is into an area of activity closely relevant to the practice of core accountability. However, in each case the extension of meaning may be challenged as weakening the importance of external scrutiny
It is well known that occupations are differentially gendered and explanations for such gendering usually focus on structure and process in the labour market. However little is known of the fine detail of the way in which labour markets perform for particular occupations in particular local contexts. This article is based on micro-sociological research on the professional labour markets for law and engineering professionals in the city of Hobart, Australia. It addresses a discrepancy in women’s participation and promotion rates in each of these professions: the proportion of women in high positions in engineering matches their educational qualification rates while that in law is considerably lower than educational qualification rates would suggest. The paper proposes that the explanation can be found in the respective organizational patterns of the two professions. Engineering is practised in large-scale bureaucratic organizations where formal rules govern recruitment and promotion, where equal opportunities legislation literally applies, and where a strict separation is maintained between public and domestic spheres. By contrast, law is practised in collegial partnerships where informal judgements govern recruitment and promotion, where the letter of equal opportunities legislation need not be applied, and where advancement depends on the subordination of the domestic to the public sphere.