Page 160 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

6. RACE COMPOSITION
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to pay $132.5 million in response to allegations that the restaurant company
discriminated against its Black employees. A former vice-president of the
company stated that the firm's discriminatory practices were the result of
the CEO's unwritten policy that "Blacks should not be employed in any
position where they would be seen by customers" (Watkins, 1993, p. 424).
The CEO himself admitted:
In looking for anything to identify why is this unit under-performing, in some
cases, I would probably have said this is a neighborhood of predominantly
White neighbors, and we have a considerable amount of Black employees and
this might be a problem, (p. 427)
At lower levels of the organization such analyses by the CEO translated into
some managers feeling they needed to "lighten-up" their restaurants—a
company euphemism for reducing the number of Black employees—and
to hire "attractive White girls" instead (p. 424).
Shoney's CEO reasoned that a restaurant's performance was affected
positively if the racial makeup of the unit's customer contact personnel
matched the customer population served. Brief (1998) asserted that the rea­
soning of Shoney's CEO reflects a bottom-line business perspective that
is seen as plausible and nonprejudicial to many managers and is com­
monplace in business organizations. The idea of a business justification
to discriminate, at first glance, may seem farfetched. It is not. Prior to the
civil rights movement, these justifications were explicitly part of the con­
tent of management education. Take, for instance, the lessons taught by
Chester I. Barnard (1938) in his classic The Functions of the Executive. He
described the informal executive organization whose purpose is to com­
municate "intangible facts, opinions, suggestions, suspicions, that cannot
pass through formal channels" (p. 225). For this informal organization to
operate effectively, Barnard prescribed selecting and promoting people to
executive positions who match those already in place. He stated:

Perhaps often and certainly occasionally men cannot be promoted or selected,
or even must be relieved, because they cannot function, because they "do not
fit" where there is no question of formal competence. This question of "fitness"
involves such matters as education, experience, age, sex, personal distinctions,
prestige, race. (p. 224)

More than three decades after the publication of Barnard's advice to ex­
ecutives, a Black manager wrote, "I believe that many of the problems I
encountered were of fit.... I was out of the 'place' normally filled by Black
people in the company" (Jones, 1973, p. 114).