Page 396 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

15. COMBATING ORGANIZATIONAL DISCRIMINATION
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50%. It was only when information about success was clear and unequiv­
ocal (rated to be in the top 5%) that the affirmative action woman was
seen as equally competent to the nonaffirmative action woman or the
man. Without clear information of success, ratings of affirmative action
women were as negative as when no information was provided and, even
more dishearteningly, as when failure information had been provided.
Ratings of the appropriateness of a salary increase, which also were ob­
tained in this study, followed exactly the same pattern as the competence
ratings.
Because of the plausible confounding of clarity of success with magni­
tude of success in this initial study—it is conceivable that those in unam­
biguous conditions were seen as more successful than those in ambigu­
ous conditions—another study was conducted operationalizing clarity of
success differently. In the second study of Heilman et al. (1997), we sys­
tematically varied the attributional ambiguity of the success information.
That is, although all research participants were exposed to equally highly
successful employees, the information provided to them allowed for dif­
ferent possible interpretations of how the employee's performance success
had come about. Specifically, a report that coaching by a senior coworker
had been available was designed to raise questions, for those participants
in the ambiguous success conditions, about the degree to which the target
employee was the unique source of his/her success.
The research participants were managers in the same insurance com­
pany that served as the site for the first study, and they too were approxi­
mately half men and half women who fell into the 25 to 54 year age range.
They were each asked to evaluate either a man, woman, or woman who
was an affirmative action hire and were exposed to either clear or am­
biguous information about performance success. As in the first study, they
evaluated a hypothetical individual who ostensibly had been employed as
a computer programmer.
The procedures were identical to those of the first study, except that all
participants received the same favorable information about the hypothet­
ical employee's performance success. Performance information was once
again conveyed in a six-month activity summary that contained a supervi-
sor's description of the employee's job activity as well as the supervisor's
rating of the category that best described the employee's job performance
during this initial six-month period. This time, however, the possible rating
categories were not percentage groups as they had been in Study 1. Instead,
the categories were "far exceeded expectations," "exceeded expectations,"
"met expectations," and "did not meet expectations." In all cases the "far
exceeded expectations" category was the one designated by the supervisor;
thus, all employees reviewed were depicted as highly successful.