Page 398 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

15. COMBATING ORGANIZATIONAL DISCRIMINATION
to discern. In either of these cases, the results of these two studies suggest
that the affirmative action stigma would persist regardless of an employee's
success, promoting biased decision making.
REACTIONS TO DIFFERENT AFFIRMATIVE ACTION POLICIES 365
As we have already noted, without information to the contrary people tend
to assume that affirmative action involves preferential selection of women
and minorities with little regard to qualifications. In actuality, however,
affirmative action is not one monolithic policy. On the contrary, there are
many variants of affirmative action policies and many different forms that
affirmative action practices and initiatives can take (Nacoste, 1990, 1996;
Taylor Carter, Doverspike, & Cook, 1996). Because in the investigations we
have reported so far the nature of the affirmative action policy was un­
stated, and therefore our participants' assumptions about it were allowed
free reign, it is important to examine the consequences when different af­
firmative action policies are explicitly presented. Particularly relevant is a
study done as part of a series of investigations that directly examined the
effect of different affirmative action policies. Our focus here is on the study
that investigated whether different affirmative action policies mitigate the
stigma of incompetence associated with affirmative action beneficiaries
(Heilman, Battle, Keller, & Lee, Study 2 1998).
Although affirmative action specifies that gender or minority status be
taken into account in personnel decision making, it does not rule out the use
of merit considerations. In fact, the law, in the form of federal regulations
and court decisions, clearly rules out the use of race alone without consid­
eration of merit. However, it is the relative weighting of group membership
versus merit criteria, such as qualifications, that differentiates between the
many strategies for implementing affirmative action in the workplace. Fol­
lowing Seligman (1973), affirmative action can be thought of as a contin­
uum, the critical dimension being the extent to which group membership
counts in decision making, with practices that focus primarily on group
membership on the "hard" end and practices that use merit as the primary
criterion on the "soft" end of the continuum. Given our ideas about the
discounting process as the mechanism driving negative competence infer­
ences regarding affirmative action beneficiaries, we reasoned that policies
that are softer, and focus more on merit, would produce fewer negative
consequences.
In order to test these ideas, our study closely followed our laboratory
study documenting the stigma of incompetence associated with affirmative
action, but included variations of the specific policy guiding the selection