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Discrimination reduces work effort of those who are disadvantaged and those who are advantaged by it

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Abstract

Research shows that discrimination is widespread in work organizations, yet we know little about the causal effects of discrimination on employees’ work effort. Here we argue that, by decoupling effort from rewards, discrimination reduces the work effort of those who are disadvantaged by discrimination and those advantaged by it. We test these arguments against the results of five experiments designed to model promotion situations in organizations (total N = 1,184). Together, these studies show that when supervised by a manager with a discriminatory preference, both disadvantaged and advantaged workers reduce their work effort relative to a control condition where the manager is not discriminatory. The negative effect of discrimination is larger for those disadvantaged by it. These effects are mediated by employees’ beliefs about how strongly work will impact their chances of reward. We then demonstrate that the relatively greater effort of advantaged—versus disadvantaged—workers in discriminatory organizations leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy: when faced with this effort differential, managers (N = 119) who did not have a priori discriminatory attitudes judged the advantaged category as more competent and deserving of workplace advancement than the disadvantaged category. Our results show that even though discrimination reduces all workers’ effort, it can ultimately produce outcomes that reify and entrench discriminatory beliefs.

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Fig. 1: Subjective likelihood of bonus.
Fig. 2: Standardized effects of advantage and disadvantage on work effort for each study and mini meta-analysis.
Fig. 3: Results of mediation analysis modelling total effects of condition on effort (reduced model) and effects of condition net of perceived effort–reward slope (full model).
Fig. 4: Scatterplot of manager survey responses.

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Data availability

Data and replication code for all studies are available online at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/WY7NR.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grant W911NF-19-1-910281 from the Army Research Office to B.S. and by funds from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Carolina to B.S. These funders had no role in the conceptualization, design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA

    Nicholas Heiserman

  2. Department of Sociology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

    Brent Simpson

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Contributions

N.H. and B.S. developed the research question and designed the experiments. N.H. ran the experiments and analysed the data. N.H. and B.S. wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Brent Simpson.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Kristen Jones, Austin Henderson and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Tables 1–26, Figs. 1–14, discussion of analytical issues and study materials.

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Supplementary Table 1

Mini meta-analysis spreadsheet.

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Heiserman, N., Simpson, B. Discrimination reduces work effort of those who are disadvantaged and those who are advantaged by it. Nat Hum Behav 7, 1890–1898 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01703-9

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