Does Diversity-Valuing Behavior Result in Diminished Performance Ratings for Non-White and Female Leaders?

We seek to help solve the puzzle of why top-level leaders are disproportionately White men. We suggest that this race- and sex-based status and power gap persists, in part, because ethnic minority and female leaders are discouraged from engaging in diversity-valuing behavior. We hypothesize, and tes...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Academy of Management journal 2017-04, Vol.60 (2), p.771-797
Main Authors: Hekman, David R., Johnson, Stefanie K., Foo, Maw-Der, Yang, Wei
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavior
Discrimination
Employment discrimination
Ethnic groups
Females
Gender stereotypes
Leadership
Men
Minority & ethnic groups
Minority groups
Multiculturalism & pluralism
Occupational psychology
Power
Race
Ratings & rankings
Stereotypes
Tokenism
Workplaces
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We seek to help solve the puzzle of why top-level leaders are disproportionately White men. We suggest that this race- and sex-based status and power gap persists, in part, because ethnic minority and female leaders are discouraged from engaging in diversity-valuing behavior. We hypothesize, and test in both field and laboratory samples, that ethnic minority or female leaders who engage in diversity-valuing behavior are penalized with worse performance ratings, whereas White or male leaders who engage in diversity-valuing behavior are not penalized for doing so. We find that this divergent effect results from traditional negative race and sex stereotypes (i.e., lower competence judgments) placed upon diversity-valuing ethnic minority and female leaders. We discuss how our findings extend and enrich the vast literatures on the glass ceiling, tokenism, and workplace discrimination.
ISSN:0001-4273
1948-0989
DOI:10.5465/amj.2014.0538