The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations

By Emilio J. Castilla, S. Benard. 2010

669 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this article, we develop and empirically test the theoretical argument that when an organizational culture promotes meritocracy (compared with when it does not), managers in that organization may ironically show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women in translating employee performance evaluations into rewards and other key career outcomes; we call this the “paradox of meritocracy.” To assess this effect, we conducted three experiments with a total of 445 participants with managerial experience who were asked to make bonus, promotion, and termination recommendations for several employee profiles. We manipulated both the gender of the employees being evaluated and whether the company's core values emphasized meritocracy in evaluations and compensation. The main finding is consistent across the three studies: when an organization is explicitly presented as meritocratic, individuals in managerial positions favor a male employee over an equally qualified female employee by awarding him a larger monetary reward. This finding demonstrates that the pursuit of meritocracy at the workplace may be more difficult than it first appears and that there may be unrecognized risks behind certain organizational efforts used to reward merit. We discuss possible underlying mechanisms leading to the paradox of meritocracy effect as well as the scope conditions under which we expect the effect to occur.

Subfields: Demography, Gender Studies, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a09105df1672c4d6ea93af074fa1ef68aa6dde5f

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Citations in the corpus

The influence of language differences on power dynamics in multinational teams (2017, background): “This resonates with meritocratic principles, which are widely endorsed in most Western organizations (Castilla & Benard, 2010).”
Why and When Does the Gender Gap Reverse? Diversity Goals and the Pay Premium for High Potential Women (2017, methodology): “We gave participants a packet of information about the employee, including a human resources (HR) file and a performance and potential appraisal form, both modeled after materials used in prior research (Castilla & Benard, 2010; Leslie, Manchester, Park, & Mehng, 2012).”
The Employment Relationship and Inequality: How and Why Changes in Employment Practices are Reshaping Rewards in Organizations (2013, background): “In a follow-up study, Castilla and Benard (2010) demonstrate that the promotion of a meritocratic culture within organizations can increase bias in pay allocation.”
Gender-role Incongruity and Audience-based Gender Bias: An Examination of Networking among Entrepreneurs (2020, background): “into evaluations in the absence of objective quality information, but even in settings with merit-based practices and when objective performance information for evaluating candidates is available, men are advantaged over equally performing women (Foschi, 2000; Castilla and Benard, 2010; Botelho and ”
Gender Inequality in Product Markets: When and How Status Beliefs Transfer to Products (2017, background): “…speci ﬁ c and diffuse status beliefs shape the evaluations of men and women in self-ful ﬁ lling ways that, on balance, disadvantage women in various labor market outcomes (e.g., Castilla and Benard 2010; Chan and Anteby 2015; Goldin and Rouse 2000; Steinpreis, Anders, and Ritzke 1999; Turco 2010).”
Neoliberal ideology in work and organizational psychology (2018, background): “Meritocracy has been described as the notion that merit and talent should be the basis for how people are rewarded in society and the workplace (Ayers & Saad-Filho, 2015; Castilla & Benard, 2010).”
Status Beliefs and the Spirit of Capitalism: Accounting for Gender Biases in Entrepreneurship and Innovation (2015, background): “Organizational efforts to prevent discrimination are also often unsuccessful and may even produce the opposite of their intended outcome ( Castilla and Benard 2010).”
Whitened Résumés (2016, background): “This paradox shares parallels with the ‘‘paradox of meritocracy,’’ whereby managers’ beliefs that their organization is meritocratic and demography-blind make them more likely to make prejudiced decisions (Castilla and Benard, 2010).”
Inside the Black Box of Organizational Life: The Gendered Language of Performance Assessment (2020, background): “…in meritocracy—the idea that individual performance should be evaluated solely on merit and accomplishments rather than on ascribed characteristics such as gender, race, or class—is a hallmark of American culture (Castilla 2008; Castilla and Benard 2010; McNamee and Miller 2004; Scully 2000).”