Suchergebnisse

PurposeHiring managers commonly rely on system-justifying motives and attitudes during résumé screening. Given the prevalent use of modern résumé formats (e.g. LinkedIn) that include not only an applicant's credentials but also headshot photographs, visible sources of information such as an applicant's race are also revealed while a hiring manager simultaneously evaluates a candidate's suitability. As a result, such screening is likely to activate evaluation bias. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of a hiring manager's perceptions of race-system justification, that is, support for the status quo in relations between Black and White job candidates in reinforcing or mitigating hiring bias related to in-group and out-group membership during résumé screening.Design/methodology/approachDrawing from system justification theory (SJT) in a pre-selection context, in an experimental study involving 174 human resource managers, the authors tested two boundary conditions of the expected relationship between hiring manager and job candidate race on candidate ratings: (1) a hiring manager's affirmative action (AA) attitudes and system-justifying attitudes and (2) a job candidate's manipulated suitability for a position. This approach enabled us to juxtapose the racial composition of hiring manager–job candidate dyads under conditions in which the job candidate's race and competency for a posted position were manipulated to examine the conditions under which White and Black hiring managers are likely to make biased evaluations. The authors largely replicated these findings in two follow-up studies with 261 students and 361 online raters.FindingsThe authors found that information on a candidate's objective suitability for a job resulted in opposite-race positive bias among Black evaluators and same-race positive bias among White evaluators in study 1 alone. Conversely, positive attitudes toward AA policies resulted in in-group favoritism and strengthened a positive same-race bias for Black evaluators (study 1 and 2). We replicated this finding with a third sample to directly test system-justifying attitudes (study 3). The way in which White raters rated White candidates reflected the same attitudes against systems (AA attitudes) that Black raters rating Black candidates exhibited in the authors' first two studies. Positive system-justifying attitudes or positive attitudes toward AA did not, however, translate into the elevation of same-race candidate ratings of suitability above those of opposite-race candidates.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough the size of the sample is on par with the percentage of Blacks nationwide in private-sector managerial-level positions ideally, the authors would have preferred to oversample Black HR managers. Given the scarcity of focus on Black HR managers, future researchers, using diverse samples of evaluators should also consider not only managers' and candidates' race but also their social dominance orientation. Moreover, it is important that future researchers use more racially diverse samples from other industries to more fully identify the ways in which the dynamics of system-justifying processes can emerge to influence evaluation bias during résumé screening.Practical implicationsAdvances in technology pose new challenges to HR hiring practices. This study attempts to fill a void regarding the unintended effects of bias during digital résumé screening. These trends have important HR implications. Initial screening of a job applicant's credentials while concurrently viewing the individual's photograph is likely to activate subconscious evaluation bias, produces inaccurate applicant ratings. This study's findings should caution hiring managers about the potential for bias to arise when viewing job candidates' digital résumés and encourage them to carefully examine various boundary conditions on racial similarity bias effects on applicant pre-screening and subsequent hiring decisions.Social implicationsThe study's results suggest that bias might be attenuated as organizational leaders engage in efforts to understand their system-justifying motives and examine perceptions of the workplace social hierarchy (i.e. responses to status hierarchies) linked to perceptions of the status quo. For example, understanding how system justifying motives influence evaluation bias will inform how best to design training and other interventions that link discussions of workforce diversity to the relationships among groups within the organization's social hierarchy. This line of research should be further explored to better understand the complex forces at work when hiring managers adopt system-justifying motives during hiring evaluations.Originality/valueThe authors address the limitations of prior research by examining interactions between boundary conditions in a real-world context using real human resources hiring managers and more contemporary personnel-screening practices to test changes in the direction and strength of the relationship between hiring manager–job candidate race and hiring manager evaluations. Thus, the authors' findings have implications for hiring bias and understanding of system-justification processes, particularly regarding how, when and why hiring managers support the status quo (i.e. perpetuate inequity) even if they are disadvantaged as a result.

This review illuminated the need for interdisciplinary integration of research on personality and groups. Network analysis of references cited in 13 previous reviews showed that this literature is fragmented; the disciplinary base has narrowed over time; is dominated by psychology, organization studies, and small group studies; and is poorly integrated with other relevant disciplines. Research from an additional seven disciplines is reviewed. Insights from the review help to identify new research directions, based on reconsidering assumptions about the temporal nature and direction of personality causality and the locus of group interaction. Implications for research practices are discussed.

Today's corporations increasingly use downsizing as a change strategy to improve organizational performance. Although downsizing and employee networks have garnered attention from both scholars and practitioners, few studies have investigated the influence of downsizing on the temporal dynamics of communication networks among surviving employees or how changes in communication patterns in organizations affect performance. To study how downsizing affects layoff survivors—extending Conservation of Resources theory to longitudinal network and employee-performance data—we examine the impact of downsizing on both the behavioral and structural consequences in an organizational network and test whether temporal changes in network members' degree centrality predict how employees who survive a downsizing event perform in their jobs. Results indicate that, during the period immediately following a downsizing event, survivors' new tie-seeking behavior results in gains in degree centrality when compared with degree centrality before the downsizing or after organization routines stabilize. Moreover, survivors with lower pre-downsizing degree centrality achieved greater gains in degree centrality than those with higher degree centrality. We find that substantial gains in degree centrality are positively related to post-downsizing performance. Efforts to regain degree centrality are abandoned during the stabilization period, and changes in degree centrality are no longer positively related to post-downsizing performance. Our results demonstrate that dynamic changes in degree centrality during disruption and stabilization periods following a downsizing event have differential effects on work-related relationships and performance. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of these results and suggest future research directions.