Emilio J. Castilla

Gender, race, and meritocracy in organizational careers.

This study helps to fill a significant gap in the literature on organizations and inequality by investigating the central role of merit‐based reward systems in shaping gender and racial disparities in wages and promotions. The author develops and tests a set of propositions isolating processes of performance‐reward bias, whereby women and minorities receive less compensation than white men with equal scores on performance evaluations. Using personnel data from a large service organization, the author empirically establishes the existence of this bias and shows that gender, race, and nationality differences continue to affect salary growth after performance ratings are taken into account, ceteris paribus. This finding demonstrates a critical challenge faced by the many contemporary employers who adopt merit‐based practices and policies. Although these policies are often adopted in the hope of motivating employees and ensuring meritocracy, policies with limited transparency and accountability can actually increase ascriptive bias and reduce equity in the workplace.

The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations

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 companys 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.

Bringing Managers Back In: Managerial Influences on Workplace Inequality

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.

Gender, Race, and the New (Merit‐Based) Employment Relationship

Recent research has focused attention on the ways institutions and work practices have transformed the employment relationship. While there has been growing interest in how key employer practices have changed the organization of work, the gender and racial implications of such practices remain less well understood. Using unique longitudinal personnel data from one large organization, this study takes a comprehensive sequential approach to identify at which stages of a widespread contemporary practice - the use of merit‐based reward programs to evaluate and reward workers - gender and racial disparities may exist. The analyses show that there are significant gender and racial differences at the performance evaluation, salary, and career setting stages, even after implementing these merit‐based work practices. I conclude by discussing the implications for how and where current organizational practices and work arrangements may affect the careers of women and racial minorities in the contemporary workplace.

Accounting for the Gap: A Firm Study Manipulating Organizational Accountability and Transparency in Pay Decisions

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 companys 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 companys 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.

House of Green Cards Statistical or Preference-Based Inequality in the Employment of Foreign Nationals

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.

Editorial Essay: Introduction to a Special Issue on Inequality in the Workplace (“What Works?”)

W hile overt expressions of racial and gender bias in U.S. workplaces have declined markedly since the passage of the original Civil Rights Act and the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission a half century ago (Eagly and Chaiken 1993; Schuman, Steeh, Bobo, and Krysan 1997; Dobbin 2009), a steady stream of research indicates that powerful, if more covert forms of bias persist in contemporary workplaces (Greenwald and Banaji 1995; Pager, Western, and Bonikowski 2009; England 2010; Heilman 2012). In line with this research, high rates of individual and class-based lawsuits alleging racial and gender discrimination suggest that many employees perceive workplace discrimination to be an important, continuing employment problem (Hirsh 2009). Hence, to ensure workplace equity, prevent legal claims of discrimination, and/or rectify past and potential problems of bias, employers have implemented a growing array of organizational policies and practices aimed at reducing discrimination and increasing inclusion. Sometimes these efforts are voluntary; other times they are driven by specific mandates assigned to firms by courts as part of verdicts or settlements in cases involving charges of discrimination. Given the millions of dollars spent on making and monitoring such changes, surprisingly little evidence exists on the efficacy of various policies and practices adopted by organizations to address the problems and to capture the benefits of having a demographically diverse workforce. And even less evidence is available on the conditions that may moderate the impact of these policies and practices. ———

The Institutional Production of National Science in the 20th Century

Science and scientific production have been widely promoted as powerful tools for advancing national economic and social development. While much progress has been made in determining whether this is the case, less understood are the underlying factors influencing national scientific activity in the first place, especially during its 20th-century global expansion. In order to advance our understanding of the development of science and world polity, this study investigates in-depth when and under what functional and institutional conditions countries chose to join any of the scientific unions comprising the ICSU, the pre-eminent and oldest international science institution in the world. According to analyses of historical data for 166 countries from 1919 to 1990, functional arguments are only important predictors of the rate at which nation-states join scientific organizations early in the ‘science diffusion’ process. After 1945, institutional factors best account for worldwide national scientific activity: The joining rate increases more quickly during the post-Second World War era with the rise of the world system. This article also provides evidence of both convergence in the evolution of national scientific activities and of the great invariability in the impact of functional and institutional factors for core and peripheral countries over time. The article concludes by discussing the implications of this research for the future study of national scientific production and development in the world.

Best in Class: The Returns on Application Endorsements in Higher Education*:

While scholars have shown that well-connected applicants are advantaged in selection processes, less understood is whether such applicants produce important returns to the organization when key decision makers favor them. We begin to address this gap by investigating whether and why application endorsements―an informal practice whereby certain individuals (i.e., endorsers) advocate for particular applicants―affect organizational selection during the screening of applicants. Through the analysis of the population of 21,324 applicants to a full-time MBA program over a seven-year period, we find that even after controlling for individual qualifications and competencies, endorsed applicants are advantaged over non-endorsed applicants in admissions interview and offer decisions. In seeking to explain this advantage, we develop and test four key theoretical explanations pertaining to the potential returns on application endorsements for the organization. We find inconsistent evidence that endorsed applicants are “better qualified” compared with non-endorsed applicants during screening: while endorsed applicants are sometimes assessed to be stronger “on paper,” they generally receive lower competency assessments than non-endorsed applicants later, during the admissions interviews. Further, our analysis of data on matriculating MBA students reveals that those endorsed as applicants are not “better performers” academically (measured by grade point average) or in the job market after graduation (measured by full-time salaries or signing bonuses) compared with non-endorsed individuals. In contrast, individuals endorsed as applicants appear to be “better citizens” upon joining the organization—in our research setting, they are more likely to participate in student club leadership roles than non-endorsed individuals. We also find that they are “better alumni”―that is, they make larger monetary donations to the school after graduating than their non-endorsed counterparts. We conclude with implications for understanding the impact of application endorsements on labor and educational markets.

Testing Attestations U.S. Unemployment and Immigrant Work Authorizations

Each year, hundreds of thousands of immigrants seek legal employment in the United States. Similar to many developed countries, the United States has established immigration policies to protect its citizens’ employment. This study empirically assesses, for the first time, the relationship between U.S. workers’ unemployment rates and immigrant work authorization outcomes, as determined by one key U.S. immigration program—the labor certification process. This program explicitly requires that no willing and qualified U.S. worker be available for the job position offered to a foreign worker. Through the analysis of 40 months of labor certification requests evaluated by U.S. Department of Labor agents, the authors find that, ironically, immigrant labor certification approvals are more likely when the quantity of unemployed U.S. workers within an occupation is high, ceteris paribus. Further, because of the U.S. government’s procedure of auditing applications, the authors are able to assess approval differences when government agents reach similar labor certification decisions using 1) employers’ accounts of their own compliance (e.g., “attestations”) or 2) supporting documentation collected when employers are audited. Only for evaluations of audited applications, in support of the literature on accounts and regulation, are approvals less likely when unemployment is high. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of their findings for theories and policies concerning labor market regulation, immigration, and employment.