Page 288 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

11

Personality-Based Stigmas
and Unfair Discrimination

in Work Organizations

Eugene F. Stone-Romero
University of Central Florida

Individuals who bear various types of stigmas (Goffman, 1963) are often
the target of unfair discrimination in work organizations (Stone, Stone, &
Dipboye, 1992). This discrimination results when decision makers use data
from invalid measures (e.g., preemployment tests) or observations (e.g.,
age, attractiveness, disability, race, and sex) as a basis for making decisions
about who will and will not be offered one or more desirable outcomes
(e.g., jobs, training, mentoring, promotions). This type of discrimination is
extremely important because a considerable body of research shows that
individuals in various social categories (e.g., racial minorities, females,
disabled, unattractive, homosexual) experience a host of problems in the
workplace that are unrelated to their actual or predicted job performance
(Stone et al., 1992). In view of the potential for stigmatized individuals to ex­
perience unfair discrimination in work organizations, this chapter focuses
on one type of stigma that may serve as the basis for such discrimination,
i.e., formal or informal measures of personality "traits." Among the im­
portant issues surrounding personality-based unfair discrimination that
are considered in the chapter are (a) the notion of unfair discrimination in
organizational contexts, (b) the stigma concept and the stigmatization pro­
cess, (c) the social-psychological processes associated with stigmatization,

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