Suchergebnisse

Innate talent and orientation toward hard work are highly important personal attributes with respect to workers' productive capabilities. In this research, we identify a discrepancy between job candidates and recruiters in their relative valuation of these two attributes. Although innate talent is valued relatively more by job candidates than recruiters, the opposite is true for orientation toward hard work. We propose that the discrepancy is rooted in a misalignment of the fundamental motivations of the two parties in the job market. In seven studies (four preregistered), which include randomized trial experiments and quasi-experiments and use real life recruiters and job seekers (across a total of 112 industries) as participants, we provide evidence of the current effect and its underlying mechanism. Studies 1A–1C demonstrate the negative consequence of the discrepancy on job market efficiency, showing that it can lead candidates to adopt impression management strategies that lower their chance of getting the job. Studies 2A and 2B show that full-time workers consider career potential to be associated with both innate talent and hard work but position performance to be more strongly associated with hard work than innate talent. Finally, Studies 3A and 3B indicate that candidates are relatively more career-focused, whereas recruiters are relatively more position focused and that this difference in their relative focus mediates the current discrepancy. Implications of the present research for both job candidates and recruiters are discussed. Funding: This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China General Program [Grant 72172136] awarded to X. Dai and University of Macau Multi-Year Research Grants [MYRG2020-00030-FBA and MYRG2022-00126-FBA] awarded to K. Si. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1667 .

Abstract
It is common that marketers design and position pretty products more to female consumers than to male consumers, suggesting that they generally believe that females have a stronger preference than males for product form over function and apply this belief to their marketing practices. However, this research demonstrates that this belief is often inconsistent with actual preferences. Across seven studies and four follow-up studies, involving both hypothetical and field settings, we demonstrate that both marketers and consumers hold such a belief about gender difference and overpredict females' preference for form-superior (vs. function-superior) products relative to males. Specifically, people tend to choose form-superior (vs. function-superior) products for female (vs. male) others, but female consumers do not choose form-superior (vs. function-superior) products for themselves more than male consumers do. We further provide convergent evidence for the underlying mechanism and boundary conditions by showing that (1) people's choices for others and themselves are more in line with the lay belief about gender difference when they hold a stronger belief and (2) people's choices for distant (vs. close) others are more in line with this lay belief. We further assess the effectiveness of several debiasing interventions and show that this lay belief is quite robust.