BUAD 304 Final - Chapter 4

Hiring

- Based on their impression of how an applicant fits the perceived requirements of a job - Decisions are made on the basis of implicit cognition - Evaluated women more favorably than men for customer service based on gender-role stereotypes Solutions for reducing the biasing effect of implicit cognition - Managers can be trained to understand and recognize this type of hidden bias - Can use structured rather than unstructured interviews (allows for reliable evaluations) - Managers can rely on evaluations from multiple interviews rather than just one or two people

Stereotype Formation and Maintenance

- Categorization: we categorize people into groups according to criteria - Inferences: we infer that all people within a particular category possess the same traits or characteristics - Expectations: we form expectations of others and interpret their behavior according to our stereotypes - Maintenance: maintain stereotypes by overestimating the frequency of stereotypic behaviors exhibited by others, incorrectly explaining expected and unexpected behaviors, differentiating minority individuals from ourselves

Education-Work Mismatches

- College graduates may be in jobs for which they are overqualified: working minimum-wage jobs; underemployed: working at jobs that require less education than they have, associated with poorer work attitudes, job performance, job satisfaction, motivation, and psychological well-being - College graduates may not have the skills desired by employers: technically and functionally competent but lack teamwork skills, critical thinking ability, oral communication skills, and analytic reasoning - High-school dropouts and others may not have the literacy skills needed for many jobs

Characteristics of the Situation

- Context of interaction: perceptions are affected by the social context in which the interaction occurs - Culture and race consistency: we more accurately recognize emotions displayed by people from our own culture or from other familiar cultures; we better understand and remember facial expressions displayed by people from our own race

Characteristics of the Target

- Direction of gaze: direct eye contact suggests interest - Facial features and body shape: use face markets for gender, race, and age, but face and body characteristics can lead us to fall back on cultural stereotypes - Nonverbal cues: gestures, touching, facial expressions, eye contact, and body movements all convey messages - Appearance or dress: all are susceptible to being influenced by appearance - Physical attractiveness: the beauty-is-good stereotype leads us to perceive attractive people positively

Characteristics of the Perceiver

- Direction of gaze: your gaze focuses your attention and tells the brain what you think is important in the immediate environment - Needs and goals: we are more likely to perceive whatever is related to our goals and needs - Experience with target: our perception of a target is influenced by our past experience with him or her - Category-based knowledge: perceptions, including stereotypes, that we have stored in memory about various categories of people - Gender and emotional status: women recognize emotions more accurately than men, and both men and women are more likely to recognize a target's emotions when they are consistent with their own; experiencing negative emotions make your perceptions more negative and opposite for positive emotions - Cognitive load: the amount of activity going on in your brain; ex. if you are tired and distracted then perceptions are more likely to be distorted and susceptible to stereotypical judgments

Performance Appraisal

- Faulty perceptions about performance can lead to inaccurate performance appraisals, which erodes morale - Can be reduced by the use of more objective measures of performance - Companies can also reduce bias by providing managers a mechanism for accurately recalling employee behavior

Most Common Barriers to Implementing Successful Diversity Programs

- Inaccurate stereotypes and prejudice - Ethnocentrism - Poor career planning - A negative diversity climate Diversity climate: a subcomponent of an organization's overall climate and is defined as the employees' aggregate perceptions about the organization's diversity related formal structure characteristics and informal values Psychological safety: reflects the extent to which people feel free to express their ideas and beliefs without fear of negative consequences - Hostile working environment for diverse employees - Diverse employees' lack of political savvy - Difficulty balancing career and family issues - Fear of reverse discrimination - Lack of organizational priority for diversity - A poor performance appraisal and reward system - Resistance to change

Managerial Challenges and Recommendations

- Managers should educate people about stereotypes and how they can influence our behavior and decision making - Managers should create opportunities for diverse employees to meet and work together in cooperative groups of equal status - Managers should encourage all employees to increase their awareness of stereotypes

How Companies are Responding to the Challenges of Diversity

- Paying attention to sexual orientation - Addressing changing customer demographics - Helping women navigate the career labyrinth On-ramping: programs encourage people to reenter the workforce after a temporary career break - Helping Hispanics succeed - Providing community and corporate training to reduce the mismatch between education and job requirements - Retaining and valuing skills and expertise in an aging workforce

Generational Differences in an Aging Workforce

- Traditionalists - Baby boomers - Gen Xers - Millennials - Gen 2020

Managerial Applications and implications

- We tend to disproportionately attribute behavior to internal causes - Other attributional biases may lead managers to take inappropriate actions - An employee's attributions for his or her own performance have dramatic effects on motivation, performance, and personal attitudes such as self-esteem

Perception

A cognitive process that enables us to interpret and understand our surroundings - Behavior is based on our perception of reality, not on reality itself Influenced by - Characteristics of the perceiver - Characteristics of the target (person or group being observed) - Characteristics of the situation

Stereotype

An individual's set of beliefs about the characteristics or attributes of a group - We need to recognize how stereotypes affect our perception because we use them without intending to or even being consciously aware that we are - Stereotypes are not always negative - May or may not be accurate - Can lead to poor decisions Stereotypes can create barriers - Gender: men were preferred for male-dominated jobs, but there was no preference for either gender in female-dominated jobs; women have a harder time than men in being perceived as effective leaders; women of color are more negatively affected by sex-role stereotypes than white women or men - Race: people of color experienced more perceived discrimination and less psychological support than whites - Age: belief that older workers are less motivated, more resistant to change, less trusting, less healthy, and more likely to have problems with work-life balance

Affirmative Action

An intervention aimed at giving management a chance to correct an imbalance, injustice, mistake, or outright discrimination that occurred in the past - An outgrowth of equal employment opportunity legislation which tries to outlaw discrimination and to encourage organizations to proactively prevent discrimination - Does not require companies to hire unqualified people - Has created tremendous opportunities for women and minorities Discrimination: occurs when employment decisions about an individual are based on reasons not associated with performance or related to the job

Access-and-Legitimacy Perspective

Based in recognition that the organization's markets and constituents are culturally diverse - Behooves the organization to match the diversity in parts of its own workforce as a way of gaining access to and legitimacy with those markets and constituent groups

Attribution Tendencies

Distort our interpretation of observed behavior - Fundamental attribution bias - Self-serving bias

Leadership

Effective leadership: - Assigning specific tasks to group members - Telling others they have done well - Setting specific goals for the group - Letting other group members make decisions - Trying to get the group to work as team - Maintaining definite standards of performance

Managing Diversity

Enables people to perform to their maximum potential - focuses on changing an organization's culture and infrastructure such that people work to the highest productivity possible Ann Morrison Three key strategies: - The educational component: prepare and overcome prejudice - The enforcement component: puts teeth in diversity goals and encourages behavior change - The exposure component: exposing people to others with different backgrounds and characteristics adds a more personal approach to diversity by helping managers get to know and respect others who are different

Kelley's Model of Attribution

Fritz Heider - Attribution theory: behavior can be attributed either to internal factors within a person (such as ability) or to external factors within the environment (such as a difficult task) Kelley hypothesized that people make causal attributions by observing three dimensions of behavior - Consensus: compares an individual's behavior with that of his or her peers (high consensus when someone acts like the rest of the group; low consensus when they act differently) - Distinctiveness: compares a person's behavior on one task with his or her behavior on other tasks (high distinctiveness means the individual has performed the task in a significantly different manner than he or she has performed other tasks) - Consistency: judges whether the individual's performance on a given task is consistent over time (high consistency implies that a person performs a certain task the same way with little or no variation over time; low consistency implies that a person is unable to perform a certain task at some standard level) Internal: low consensus, low distinctiveness, high consistency External: high consensus, high distinctiveness, low consistency

Glass Ceiling

Identifies an invisible but absolute barrier that prevents women from advancing to higher-level positions

Americans with Disabilities Act

Prohibits discrimination against those with disabilities and requires organizations to reasonably accommodate an individual's disabilities

Framework of Options

R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr. Eight generic action options that organizations can use to address any type of diversity issue Option 1: Include/exclude Option 2: Deny Option 3: Assimilate Option 4: Suppress Option 5: Isolate Option 6: Tolerate Option 7: Build relationships Option 8: Foster mutual adaptation

Fundamental Attribution Bias

Reflects our tendency to attribute another person's behavior to his or her personal characteristics, rather than to situation factors - Cause perceivers to ignore important environmental factors - Inaccurate assessments of performance

Implicit cognition

Represents any thoughts or beliefs that are automatically activated from memory without our conscious awareness - Lead to biased deacons without realizing

Self-Serving Bias

Represents our tendency to take more personal responsibility for success than for failure - Suggests employees will attribute their success to internal factors (high ability or hard work) and their failures to uncontrollable external factors (tough job, bad luck, uncooperative coworkers or boss)

Diversity

Represents the multitude of differences and similarities that exist among people - Diversity pertains to the host of individual differences that make each of us unique and different from all others Gardenswartz and Rowe identified four layers of diversity to help distinguish the important ways in which people differ - Personality (at center): represents a stable set of characteristics responsible for a person's identity - Internal dimensions/Surface level characteristics: those that are quickly apparent to interactants, such as race, gender, and age; unchangeable so strongly influence our attitudes, expectations, assumptions which influence our behavior - External influences: individual differences over which we have more control such as where we live, religious affiliation, marital and parental status, work experience - Organizational dimensions (seniority, job title and function, and work location). Deep-level characteristics: those that take time to emerge in interactions, such as attitudes, opinions, and values

Causal Attributions

Suspected or inferred causes of behavior

Demographics

The statistical measurements of populations and their qualities (such as age, race, gender, or income) over time - The study of demographics helps us better appreciate diversity and helps mangers develop human resource policies and practices that attract, retain, and develop qualified employees

LGBT

Widely recognized acronym to represent lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender - Lack of inclusion affects engagement, performance, and retention