Page 248 - Microaggressions in Everyday Live Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation

222 microaggressive impact in the workplace and employment

The consultant, himself an Asian American, was bothered by the company ’ s
definition of the problem and the possible hidden assumptions: The primary

cause for underrepresentation in the higher echelons of the company was (1)
Asian Americans make poor leaders and managers, and (2) are unassertive,
passive, noncompetitive, and lack leadership skills. The employees would profi t
from training to achieve company - defined leadership criteria. While this was a

possible explanation, the consultant was struck by how closely these descriptions
followed societal stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans: they are passive,
inhibited, make poor leaders and managers, and are poor in relationships, but
make good scientists and technicians (S. Sue, Sue, Zane, & Wong, 1985).
In working with top management, all those present repeatedly stressed
how much they valued the contributions of Asian American employees, and
that the company could not function effectively without their presence in
the organization. They denied that there was bias in their selection of White
coworkers over Asians who had the same seniority, but that “ perhaps Asian
Americans just don ’ t make good leaders or top level business associates. ”
To this the consultant posed an interesting question to the leadership team:
If Asians and Asian Americans don ’ t make good business leaders, how is it
that businesses in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China are so successful in
competing on the worldwide stage?
Many organizations do not realize that “ leadership effectiveness and behav-
iors ” are culture - bound and may not be correlated with success. For example,

among Asians and Asian Americans, leadership is defined as a person ’ s
ability to work behind the scenes, building group consensus and motivating
fellow workers to increase productivity (Sue, 2008). This is in marked con-
trast to U.S. appraisal criteria of leadership: assertive, “ take charge, ” highly
visible, and competitive. In working with the company, the consultant used
another approach to identify good potential managers. Members of the work
team were asked to identify and rank in a private survey those coworkers
most important in helping the team increase their productivity and who were

most influential to the success of the task. Surprisingly, this method identifi ed
a number of Asian American names.

These findings allowed the consultant to work with the company in looking
at their performance appraisal systems and the job descriptions (criteria)
used for hiring, retention, and promotion of employees. It led the company
to question whether the current criteria used to promote certain groups in
the workplace (employees of color and women) were truly unbiased or the
evaluations were culture - bound. There are several important implications to
this particular work - related example.

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