Page 137 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

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GELFANDETAL
of recruiting, selecting, and training replacement employees, turnover as­
sociated with perceived bias and discrimination can be extremely costly
for organizations (Robinson & Dechant, 1997).
In addition to these financial costs, there are other consequences of dis­
crimination that may impair organizational effectiveness. The reputation
of the organization is likely to be impaired by public awareness of discrim­
ination in that organization (Wentling & Palmas-Rivas, 1997). An organi-
zation's reputation not only influences current employees' commitment
and the perceived fulfillment of their psychological contracts, but also it
influences the organization's ability to attract qualified applicants (Robin­
son & Dechant, 1997) and may also influence customers' willingness to
purchase products and services (Pruitt & Nethercutt, 2002). Discrimination
may also have implications for the overall quality of the product or service
being produced (e.g., Eisenberger, Fasolo, & Davis-LaMastro, 1990). Em­
ployees in service organizations tend to treat customers consistently with
how they are treated (Schneider, White, & Paul, 1998), thus employees who
are mistreated through discriminatory behaviors may be likely to provide
poor customer service. Finally, researchers have proposed and found a link
between experiences of discrimination and employees' levels of stress and
strain (Gee, 2002; Shaffer, Joplin, Bell, Lau, & Oguz, 2000; Waldo, 1999),
which may increase organizations' costs through worker's compensation
claims, health insurance, and disability leave (Northwestern National Life
Insurance Company, 1991).

FRONTIERS OF RESEARCH ON ORGANIZATIONAL DISCRIMINATION

We have shown that organizational discrimination is the result of mul­
tiple interrelated organizational-level processes. That is, throughout our
discussion, we have illustrated how organizational structure, culture, lead­
ership, strategy, HR systems, and climate all work together as organiza­
tional throughputs to create an environment in which discrimination is
either prohibited and sanctioned or subtly tolerated. In this final section,
we highlight a number of critical areas for future research on organizational
discrimination.

The Importance of Alignment

In this chapter, we have discussed organizational-level antecedents to dis­
crimination as if they were largely independent. This was done, in part, for
ease of presentation. However, existing research on discrimination has, in
fact, tended to examine sources of discrimination in isolation of each other.