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If you believe your company is a meritocracy, hiring only the best people, you may want to sit down with colleagues involved in that process and discuss what criteria each of you use in selecting new staff. How do you choose – or balance between – the various possibilities? Are you hiring the best person for the current job opening or the best person for down the road? Discuss how you source candidates and promote from within in the meritocracy.
What about biases you and other people hiring have? Studies repeatedly show racial and gender biases in hiring and there are other biases as well. Early in my career, I found myself favouring people for editing and reporting roles like me who were quiet and unassuming in interviews. After all that reflection, if you’re honest, you may decide you are not necessarily a meritocracy scooping up the best people – it’s more complicated than you are acknowledging.
If you’re still not convinced, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Emilio J. Castilla has another factor for you to consider: The meritocracy paradox. The more you believe you have a meritocracy, the less likely it is you have one.
“According to the results of my studies, the belief that an organization is meritocratic may actually foster biased, non-merit-based behaviour,” he writes in The Meritocracy Paradox.
With Stephen Benard, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University, he asked more than 400 professionals to imagine they were evaluating candidates to join a large service-sector employer. Half the professionals were told a core value of the company is meritocracy while that was not emphasized with the second group.
Study participants were asked to allocate a yearly bonus to each employee from a limited pool of $1,000. They were told to base their employment decisions on the annual employee performance reviews but names were varied on the profiles to test the impact of gender. Those not told their organization was meritocratic gave equally high-performing men and women similar bonuses (women $2 more, which is not statistically significant). But those told they were part of a meritocratic organization offered men, on average, a bonus $46 higher than equally performing women, which is a statistically different result.
“The paradox of meritocracy may help explain the persistence of pay disparities related to demographics and other personal qualities in many organizations,” Prof. Castilla says. “When managers believe their company is meritocratic, they may be less vigilant about their actions and unintentionally make biased decisions. This could happen because they feel their decisions are unlikely to be perceived as prejudiced, making them less careful about avoiding stereotypes. They may further have a false sense of confidence in their impartiality, leading to little self-examination to uncover any hidden biases in their decisions.”
He calls it an example of “moral credentialling,” in which past good deeds can liberate people to undertake less virtuous acts. One study by other researchers found priming one’s sense of personal objectivity prior to making hiring evaluations increased gender bias in favour of men over women. Another study found that participants who imagined volunteering or donating to charity were more likely to make a self-indulgent purchase of a luxury item afterward than those who had not just affirmed their moral integrity.
“In other words, a sense of belonging to a fair and equitable organization or participating in fair and equitable processes may unleash individuals’ stereotypic thoughts and beliefs, ultimately leading to more demographic bias and disparities in key employment-related decisions,” he says.
Merit, he warns, is in the eye of the beholder and evaluating talent can be a fuzzy process. Definitions of merit for a job start off sounding objective, with a focus on skills and experience for the particular position, but soon they become more subjective, with references to things such as reliability and productivity. After that, it can descend into buzzwords. The complexity of the definition of merit also increases as you move to roles and positions for which skills, experience and other individual work-related competencies become less objective or difficult to measure. That’s when companies often start talking about the importance of “cultural fit,” which can heighten bias and close the organization off to new ideas.
Keep in mind as well, as you grapple with this, that a belief in meritocracy makes people more accepting of inequality. So that can play out in your hiring and promotion fairness. And many talent management processes are heavily dependent on interviews, yet research has shown they can be ineffective, encouraging people to be swayed by feelings of “chemistry” and other biases.
Prof. Castilla draws three warnings from his extensive work over the years on recruiting and promotions in the private sector, universities and government:
- Simply having organizational processes in place to hire, evaluate and promote the best does not automatically guarantee fairness, equity or diversity in practice. Any talent management process can be subject to bias and there is a risk that people-based management systems may actually reinforce or create advantages for certain groups over others.
- Emphasizing meritocracy implicitly or explicitly as the foundation of hiring, promotion and reward practices may backfire on women, racial minorities, immigrants and other historically disadvantaged groups.
- There is no universal agreement on what merit actually is. Even managers and executives with similar training and experience within the same organization often hold differing views.
Proceed with caution rather than confidence.
Cannonballs
- The current federal government, which promotes itself as businesslike, and its Major Projects Office, might want to consider one of the quiet innovations of the past decade, red teams, in which businesses and governments set up special teams with contrarian thinkers to test the validity of proposed initiatives. No doubt we’ll be hearing lots of negatives from interested parties after projects are announced but a sound, honest study beforehand is a businesslike approach for major national projects.
- Kevin Frechette, chief executive officer of artificial intelligence company Fairmarkit, says before bringing in AI companies must answer two questions: How will it help our teams do their best work and how will we make sure it never erodes trust?
- Executive coach Dan Rockwell suggests incompetent leaders approach change the same way a toddler approaches finger painting: “Enthusiastically! Recklessly! And with no thought of the cleanup.”
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.