Intro

“Coleman’s boat” is a useful heuristic to distinguish between micro and macro levels of analysis and analyze micro-macro interrelationships

—> Dependent on situation (we have to consider (organizational) influences)

• One of the most used measures of economic inequality

• Problem: We only know the negative effects of economic equality but gender pay gap still very high

Inequality has several negative effects for individuals, firms, and society at large.

- Firms: firm performance, employee trust, employee retention and turnover

- Individuals: poverty risk, social exclusion, social status

Different definitions:

- Unadjusted GPG and adjusted GPG.

Reasons and mechanisms creating and contributing to

GPG are diverse.

- We will look at papers taking different perspectives regarding the GPG.

Understanding Role Allocation in Organizations

• Definition: The process of assigning roles and responsibilities to individuals within an organization.

• Importance: Role allocation significantly influences career trajectories and shapes employee identities.

1. How is Inequality Perpetuated and Reinforced?

• Bias in Role Assignment: Organizations often favor certain groups (e.g., based on gender, race) in role allocation, leading to systemic disparities.

• Stereotyping: Preconceived notions about individuals' capabilities based on social categories influence who is assigned to which roles.

2. How Does Role Allocation Manifest Inequality?

• Limited Access: Marginalized individuals are frequently excluded from key roles that lead to advancement.

• Reinforcement of Status Quo: Those in power maintain existing allocations, creating barriers for underrepresented groups and perpetuating inequality.

3. Which Actors Are Involved in the Practice of Role Allocation?

• Senior Management: Decision-makers who influence role assignments based on biases and organizational culture.

• Human Resources: Responsible for implementing recruitment and promotion practices that can either challenge or reinforce inequality.

• Employees: Individuals who may internalize feedback and stereotypes, affecting their career choices and aspirations.

Conclusion: Understanding the actors involved in role allocation is crucial for addressing and mitigating the perpetuation of inequality within organizations. By recognizing biases and implementing inclusive practices, organizations can work towards equitable role allocation.

This presentation effectively addresses the key questions regarding the perpetuation of inequality through role allocation, how it manifests, and the actors involved in the process.

Macro level: Associations at a collective level (country, organization, department, team, etc.)

Example questions:

• How does technology adoption affect organizational performance?

• How do human resource management practices affect the gender pay gap?

Micro Level: actions of causal agents (individuals

Qs:

• How does tech. helps individuals in their productivity?+

• How do managers make promotion decisions?

• Situational mechanism: Downward causation?

• Behavioral mechanism: Bounded rationality

• Transformational mechanism: Supervenience and emergence

Colemans Boat implies “downward causation”: Macro-level constructs or entities, such as organizational practices like hiring, promotion, and compensation, affect individuals and their behaviors (e.g., selection decisions, internal mobility, effort)

Downward causation is not from a methodological individualism standpoint – macro-level entities have no causal power; it is in line with methodological collectivism, but this approach also has challenges, such as people as “initial conditions”

• people make the place - culture, employer reputation, culture influence the organization

• B = f (P,S) - person-situation paradigm —> Behavior is a function of the person and the situation, where the situation (“context”) is modeled as a causal influence

• Cowen et al. (2022:3): The challenge is to engage with the theoretical mechanisms that underpin these alternate explanations and integrate them into a cohesive theoretical model. This calls for authors to address why, when, and how a macro-level construct impacts the individual perceptions, cognitions, emotions, or decisions that are the focus of their work

Making predictions requires an universal decision rule: “rationality” (= utility maximization with perfect knowledge) is as important in social sciences as “causality” is in natural sciences, but —>

• People are not rational - humans are only boundedly rational

  • Incomplete information (applicants cannot know all the attributes of a job in an unknown organization)

  • Imperfect information processing (recruiters have difficulty weighting applicant attributes)

  • Information asymmetry (applicants know their attributes better than the recruiter

M&S scholarship studies the decision-making of individuals – of the upper echelons (top managers) in organizations and of “regular” employees, shareholders, and stakeholders

• People make the place

  • Collectives can be reduces to their individual components

  • Q: how individual interactions aggregate to collectives?

• Collectives cannot be reduced to the individual level

  • Collectives = more than individual part, even with all information of all individuals ≠ reconstruct the collective

  • Multiple realization: Identical collectives can emerge from different initial conditions

• Individual diffs/similarities give us identity and help us structure our social life.

  • Surface-level diversity: diff observable characteristics (age, race) + often associated w. stereotypes + assumptions

  • Deep-level diversity: diff in latent characteristics (personality, traits, values) —> increasingly important for determining similarity/diversity if ones gets to know each other better

—> Some are given (≠change like gender) some can change (attitude)

—> help us structure - never 100% true

—> surface-level attributes are often used to infer deep-level attributes

• Ways in which individual reacts and interacts to each other

• 40% - heredity and 60% - environment

• Change more likely in adolescence than adulthood

• Personality characteristics which are enduring over time = personality traits

• Openness to experience: characterizes someone in terms of imagination, sensitivity, and curiosity

• Conscientiousness: responsible, dependable, persistent, and organized

• Extraversion: sociable, gregarious, and assertive

• Agreeableness: good natured, cooperative, and trusting

• Neuroticism/emotional stability: characterizes someone as calm, self-confident, and secure (positive) versus nervous, depressed and insecure (negative)

Takeout:

• Behavior is not consistent

• We should use different situations to predict better

• correlation strong = we can use the mesure

• correlation weak = economical relevance low

• Big 5 can be used for the prediction who of the team members/staff should go to training

There are more personality dimensions than the Big Five

Core self-evaluations: Bottom-line conclusions individuals have about their capabilities, competence, and worth as a person. Examples: self-efficacy and self-esteem.

Self-monitoring: A personality trait that measures an individual’s ability to adjust their behavior to situations.

Proactive personality: Individuals who score high on such traits show initiative, act, and persevere until meaningful change occurs.

Dark Triad: A constellation of negative personality traits. (success is the only goal)

• Machiavellianism: The degree to which an individual is pragmatic, maintains emotional distance, and believes that ends can justify means.

• Narcissism: The tendency to be arrogant, individuals have a grandiose sense of self-importance, require excessive admiration, and possess a sense of entitlement.

• Psychopathy: The tendency for a lack of concern for others and a lack of guilt or remorse when actions cause harm.

• Personality and other individual characteristics cause people to behave similarly in different situations and over time

• People who “always” behave in a consistent way are ascribed a certain personality (certain stability in behavior)

• How does the situation influence behavior, and how does the situation moderate the influence of personality on behavior? Two approaches:

  • Situation strength theory

  • Trait activation theory

Situation strength theory - situations range from weak to strong

• Weak situations = ambiguous, not very stimulating, or without constraints. Weak situations, personality = relatively strong predictor of behavior (no framework or structure so personality is the guideline)

• Strong situations = clear, arousing, or constraining. Strong situations, personality = much weaker predictor of behavior (e.g. hard deadline like ba/ma thesis - need to fulfill, no matter what - personality ≠ matters, everyone needs to fulfill the deadline)

Strength of the situation moderates the influence of personality on behavior

Trait activation theory distinguishes between different facets of personality - some situations will activate certain traits more than others —> specific behaviors can be predicted from specific situational cues

A variation of trait activation theory = sensitivity theory.

Some individuals (with certain traits) = particularly triggered by certain situational cues —> individuals will show their traits particularly clearly

Situation strength:

• All five traits were more predictive of performance for jobs in which the process by which the work was done represented weak situations (e.g., work was unstructured, employee had discretion to make decisions).

Trait activation:

• Extraversion better predicted performance in jobs requiring social skills

• Agreeableness was less positively related to performance in competitive contexts

• Openness was more strongly related to performance in jobs with strong innovation or creativity requirements

Psychopathy is a very toxic partition of the dark triad; (corporate) psychopaths are described as

• having a callous affect (e.g., lack of empathy and remorse)

• erratic lifestyle and antisocial tendencies (e.g., impulsive, irresponsible)

• being manipulative (e.g., grandiose, dishonest)

Psychopaths = chameleons (appear intelligent and charming; are often eloquent; skilled at faking emotions and using this ability to their advantage)

Psychopaths can function normally and successfully in everyday life and achieve high social status.

Research has even suggested (and delivered preliminary evidence) that the probability of corporate psychopaths in the C-suite is higher than in the normal population.

Recent research has also linked psychopathy to sexist attitudes and a tendency to dehumanize women. This led us to theorize that CEO psychopathy could be related to gender inequality, operationalized by the gender pay gap.

At the same time, not every environment is the same.

We argue that the direct and indirect effects of CEO psychopathy on the gender pay gap will be moderated: CEO power, HR department, Firm size, Female representation on the board of directors, Equality legislation

• Directly: CEOs make resource allocation decisions (e.g., staffing and power of the HR department); CEOs are role models

• Indirectly: CEOs set the tone at the top; CEO behaviors cascade down the organization and influence how lower-level managers interpret the context and behave

Example: Managers contribute to important HR decisions (e.g., hiring, promotion, compensation) through performance reviews. In an equitable culture, even non-supportive managers will be sensitive to making fair evaluations and decisions.

In a sexist environment, these managers may use discretion to make gender-biased evaluations and decisions.

Castilla, E. J. (2015). Accounting for the gap: A firm study manipulating organizational accountability

and transparency in pay decisions. Organization Science, 26: 311–333.

In a series of studies, Castilla has analyzed “the meritocracy paradox”: companies implement HR

practices to enhance equity (performance evaluations, performance-based promotion and pay), but

inequity does not disappear.

“After conducting a careful longitudinal analysis of ServiCo’s pay decisions between 1996 and 2003, I reported to high-level management an observed small but significant gap in the distribution of merit-based pay rewards, where women, ethnic minorities, and non-U.S.-born employees were rewarded lower pay increases compared with U.S.-born white men with the same performance evaluation scores, in the same job and work unit, with the same evaluating manager, and with the same human capital characteristics.”

“I did not find gender, race, or foreign nationality disparities in career outcomes such as promotion and termination” (p. 317)

—> Promotions are transparent, bonuses are not —> imply a structure!