Page 406 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

15. COMBATING ORGANIZATIONAL DISCRIMINATION
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convenience. Heterogeneity of the group once again had no impact on
these ratings.
Taken together this series of studies demonstrates that being associated
with efforts to ensure demographic diversity can have potentially harmful
consequences. It seems that affirmative action programs are not unique in
their ability to raise doubts regarding a beneficiary's qualifications. Other
selection processes that highlight demographic group membership also
run the risk of feeding inferences that its likely beneficiaries are incompe­
tent and ill equipped to effectively perform the work required.
CONCLUSIONS

Throughout the course of this chapter we have presented research that
supports the idea that affirmative action and other programs designed
to reduce the incidence of discrimination in work organizations, rather
than becoming part of the solution, can become part of the problem. As we
have demonstrated, being associated with programs that draw attention to
gender or minority status can ultimately lead to the derogation of intended
beneficiaries, tainting them with a stigma of incompetence. Thus, the very
individuals these programs are designed to help may instead be harmed.
One striking finding of the many studies reported here is the appar­
ent pervasiveness of the stigma of incompetence. Whether the raters were
women or men, whether they were working people or students, and
whether they were old or young, they rated potential beneficiaries of
affirmative action programs in the same way. Moreover, their reactions
were much the same regardless of whether the potential beneficiaries were
women or racial minorities, or whether the program was specifically la­
beled as affirmative action or was said to be focused on ensuring demo­
graphic diversity. Thus, the general tendency we uncovered in these inves­
tigations seems quite robust: programs that highlight demographic group
membership as a critical feature in decision making run the risk of harming
those they are designed to help.
Does everyone react equally negatively to potential beneficiaries of af­
firmative action? Although we have not presented it here, extensive work
has been conducted examining predictors of attitudes toward affirmative
action programs. Not only have numerous studies found that attitudes to­
ward affirmative action programs are significantly affected by the structure
of the affirmative action plan (Kravitz, 1995; Kravitz & Klineberg, 2000), but
also individual difference variables such as race, gender, political ideology,
and prejudice have been found to predict the endorsement of affirmative
action policies (Kravitz et al., 1997). Racism and sexism, for example, have