Page 197 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

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CLEVELAND, VESCIO, BARNES-FARRELL
at work is provided, there may be discrimination. The very practice that
is similarly implemented for men and women may put women at a dis­
advantage because the conditions of nonwork differ dramatically for men
and women. For example, a seemingly harmless and neutral practice of
scheduling a critical meeting for 4:00 pm may differentially affect male
and female employees with caregiving responsibilities. Women are more
likely to take responsibility for their children's after-school care and will
be disadvantaged by that practice. In this final section of the chapter, we
point out some important implications of recognizing the broader context
in which gender discrimination resides. In particular, we will focus on the
implications of this approach for (a) less often considered indicators of
unfair bias, (b) the seriousness of sex discrimination, and (c) methodolog­
ical issues and gaps in current research in industrial and organizational
psychology and applied psychology.

Alternative Indicators of Discriminatory Workplaces

The developmental, sociological, and feminist literatures allow us to con­
struct alternative lenses from which to view the workplace. Through these
lenses, we can identify a number of features of the work and nonwork
place that have been researched but not in relation to gender discrimina­
tion. These include more general issues of definitions of success or per­
formance at work (e.g., criterion deficiency), less visible forms of potential
discrimination (including the influence of language and humor/joking),
workplace exclusion, the structure of work, and family structure. Each of
these issues is briefly discussed below.
What is Success? Criterion Deficiency in Our Assessments In industrial
and organizational psychology, more attention has been given to such pre­
dictors of performance as cognitive ability tests and personality tests than
to the performance construct itself (Campbell, 1990). How has success been
defined? Historically, work psychologists have defined job success as the
extent to which an employee successfully performs the core tasks in the
job—namely the required aspects of the job including production, prob­
lem solving, organizing activities, and so forth. It is only within the last
15 years that another facet of job success has been recognized, variously
known as contextual performance (CP) or organizational citizenship be­
havior (OCB). CP (and OCB) represents behaviors that create and maintain
a context in which people can work together and cooperate in production.
Work occurs in social settings and maintenance of the social fabric of work
is every bit as important as maintaining the machines and grounds. Good
performance, in terms of CP, involves helping coworkers, being consider­
ate, paying attention to other other's needs and so forth.