Research
Interests
My program
of research investigates issues on diversity and discrimination in the context
of human resource management. I have also been involved in additional research
that examines issues in leadership, emotions, and the management of new
technology. Below, I describe in detail the work that I have done in these
areas as well as future directions for research.
Diversity and
Discrimination in Human Resource Practices: Manifestations and Remediation
The Selection Interview
My main line
of research examines organizational diversity initiatives that lead to the
reduction of discrimination. The first study was inspired by the landmark case in which the Supreme Court of the United
States upheld the right to consider one’s race in recruiting and offering
admission to students at the University of Michigan. This decision is consonant
with some organizations that have taken what they believe to be proactive steps
in recruiting and selecting minorities by considering race and diversity as an
important factor in today’s business (identity-conscious). Many
organizations, however, take a blind approach to recruiting and selecting
individuals, in which employment decisions (e.g., hiring, promotion, pay) are
made without regard to an individual’s race (i.e., identity-blind). Under
such hiring guideline conditions, interviewers may be expected to suppress
information about others’ social identity, because they are instructed or
legally required to not consider race. Such instructions rely upon
peoples’ ability to successfully follow such suppression instructions,
which might have negative repercussions associated with suppression attempts.
That is, Wegner and colleagues have shown that if people deliberately try not
to think abut a particular topic (e.g., a white bear), the 
frequency of thinking about that topic
will increase, particularly after the passage of time (Wegner, Schneider,
Carter, & White, 1987). Time pressure, stress, and/or cognitive busyness
sometimes interfere with the goal of suppressing thoughts (e.g., prejudice),
resulting in situations in which prejudice reemerges at a subsequent time,
leading to discrimination.
In the ongoing research that
we have done, we examined the influence of hiring guidelines
(identity-conscious or identity-blind) on interview outcomes. Based on mental
control theory (Wegner, 1994), we expected and found that identity-blind
guidelines lead to biased behavior in subsequent but not initial evaluations.
That is, after the completion of the first of two interviews, interviewers who
were instructed to follow the identity-blind guidelines chose a larger social
distance from subsequent Black applicants and reported lower levels of positive
attitudes toward Black individuals than did interviewers instructed to follow
the identity-conscious guidelines. This study further revealed that interview
structure can act as a mitigating force to eliminate biases created by
identity-blind hiring guidelines. We found that structured interviews and
policies in which interviewers are allowed to consider race openly result in
the least amount of discrimination. This is exciting because it suggests that
at least under certain conditions, organizations can adopt strategies that
reduce prejudice. Organizations that take an identity-conscious approach to
their hiring policies not only reduce possible discrimination, but they also
have the potential of gaining a competitive edge over firms that do not take
such proactive steps in managing diversity.
In a follow-up
study of this experiment, I collected data on Fortune 500 organizations to
replicate the results of study 1. More specifically, I compared the fifty
organizations that are on the “Best Companies for Minority Employees”
to a random sample of fifty organizations from the Fortune 500 list in terms of
their hiring policies and interview methods. I found that organizations that
have an identity-conscious hiring policy and use structured interviews were
more likely to be placed on the list of “Best Companies for Minority
Employees.”
Letters of Recommendation and the Resume
I also examine
gender differences in letters of recommendation. Using archival data, I
analyzed 685 letters of recommendation for psychology faculty applicants to
examine gender differences in agentic and communal
attributions using language content analysis. Results showed that women were
described as more communal than were men. Men were described as more agentic than were women. Thus, men and women are described
differently in letters of recommendation, even after controlling for
publication count, teaching experience, and honors. I am currently running a
follow-up study that examines whether agentic
qualities are rated as more 
important than are communal qualities
for psychology professor positions. Furthermore, I am collecting data on the
“hireability” of applicants based on
their letters of recommendation. In particular, six professors are rating the
extent to which they would hire the candidate based on their letter (all gender
identifying information was removed as to not confound their rating of hireability with gender). I hypothesize that agency would
be a stronger predictor of hireability than
communion, which would suggest that if women are described as less agentic than men, but agency is a significant predictor of hireability, then women are at a
disadvantage as a function of their letters. This work is being prepared for a
manuscript that will be submitted to the Personnel
Psychology.
In another
study, I examined the negative impact of occupational stereotypes across
multiple racial groups. In this
experiment, I manipulated both the name (Asian American, Black, Hispanic, or
White) and quality of the résumé (high or low). White male participants
(N = 155) read a fictitious
résumé, evaluated the applicant, and judged his suitability for
jobs of various status. The results revealed that Asian American individuals
were evaluated highly and rated as suitable for high-status jobs, regardless of
their résumé quality. White and Hispanic applicants both
benefited from a high-quality résumé, but Black applicants were
evaluated negatively even with strong credentials. This has implications for
organizational policies that would reduce discrimination, such as implementing
blind reviews of resumes. This particular project has been published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.
Diversity Training
In another study, conducted
with a team of fellow graduate students and professors, we are interested in
strategies of diversity training. In particular, current research draws from
theories in social and organizational psychology to design and compare three
strategies of diversity training: 1) goal-setting, 2) perspective-taking, and
3) stereotype discrediting. Taken together, these theories suggest that
diversity training programs might be enhanced by integrating theory-based
modules.
In the first
study, I utilized an existing, annual diversity training program as a field
setting to test the effectiveness of a goal-setting strategy. All incoming
students for a small southern university were contacted via email during the
summer before arriving at the university and asked to complete an online
questionnaire assessing attitudes toward sexual orientation diversity,
experience with sexual orientation diversity, and expectations about diversity
in college. In addition, my colleagues and I integrated a theory-based module
into diversity training for new students during their orientation week.
Specifically, incoming students were randomly assigned to one of the two
conditions (goal-setting or control) with regard to GLBT individuals during
their diversity training during orientation. New students' upperclassmen
advisors also participated by being randomly assigned to the goal-setting or
control condition. Participants were recruited three weeks post-training. I
hypothesized found an overall main effect of time such that students' attitudes
improved between their ratings from the orientation week (when we implemented
out goal-setting manipulation) and their ratings three weeks later. I
replicated the results at the end of the semester, approximately three months
later, and at this time point we also found that students engaged in more GLBT supportive behaviors when they and their
advisors set goals related to GLBT diversity. It was at the end of the school year that I found an overall main
effect of time, such that students' attitudes improved between their ratings
from the orientation week and their ratings at the end of the school year, and
that the attitude change occurred when
both students and advisors set goals. I also found, that the change in
attitudes and behaviors depended on their advisors’ goals.
On a study of
sexual harassment, I examined the characteristics of a sexual harassment schema
and its consequences. I propose that sexual harassment schemas are constructed
according to gender role expectations. I further suggest that, consonant with
expectancy-violation theory, deviations from individuals’ schema will be
evaluated negatively. Therefore, I
used an expectancy-violation theory as a framework and employed an
organizational grievance paradigm. Reactions to sexual harassment complainants
were expected to be less favorable when the complainant was male than when the
complainant was female. Results confirmed that male sexual harassment
complainants are believed less, liked less, and punished more than are female
complainants. Furthermore, the tendency to believe and like female complainants more than male complainants was stronger when
complainants were physically attractive. We went beyond previous research that
examines labeling of harassment in exploring the believability, likeability,
and punishment of harassment interactants.
Furthermore, in a practical sense, the current findings point to the difficulty
of determining consequences for harassment claims in an organizational context.
Decisions appeared to be heavily influenced by the schema of sexual harassment.
Unfortunately, this highlights the difficulty that legitimate victims of
harassment may face. While the majority of sexual harassment victims are women,
the number of men filing sexual harassment has been increasing over the last
two decades (EEOC, 2004). Because of sexual harassment schemas, though, it is a
common misconception that women are victims and men are the perpetrators of
sexual harassment. Thus, the current research demonstrates that it is critical
for decision makers and victims of harassment to be cognizant of how schemas
may influence responses to sexual harassment complaints. This paper has been
published in Sex Roles.
Dissertation
In my
dissertation I will be examining the processes in which visible stigmas (e.g., birthmark
on face) affect the selection interview outcomes and methods that individuals
might use as remediation strategies.
The mechanism
for understanding how stigmatization influences the interview process and outcomes
has been largely ignored, as have strategies that attempt to reduce such
discrimination. Thus, the purpose of this dissertation is to examine both the
processes in which stigma affects interview outcomes and methods that
individuals might use as remediation strategies. In particular, this
dissertation will draw from theory and research on perceived stigma (Pryor,
Reeder, Yeadon, & McInnis, 2004), attentional
processes (Rink & Becker, 2006), and cognitive resources (Muraven & Baumeister, 2000).
Pryor et al. (2004) proposed a theoretical model of individual psychological
reactions to perceived stigma, in which reactions to stigma involve a
reflexive, automatic system that may elicit anxiety or other negative affect.
Research demonstrates that attentional processes play
an important role in that attention is biased selectively toward threatening
stimuli (Rink & Becker, 2006). It is possible that stigmatizing features
that are visible are interpreted as threatening by others. Thus,
when individuals are confronted with a stigmatized individual (e.g., a birth
mark on his/her face), individuals might be more likely to focus their
attention to the features of the stigma, which could interfere with limited
cognitive resources (Muraven & Baumeister, 2000).
While there
are empirical and theoretical reasons to hypothesize that stigmas will have a
negative effect in interview contexts, there is research that shows that
stigmatized individuals can proactively 
remediate potential negative reactions
from perceivers. In fact, Goffman (1963) noted that
many times stigmatized individuals engage in stigma management. One such
strategy is controlling the potential negative reaction from perceivers by
disclosing or acknowledging (i.e., act of directly referring to one’s stigma
during an interaction). Acknowledgment can also reduce negative feelings
towards stigmatized individuals. I expect that acknowledgment might be
beneficial if it draws focus on the feature but then it makes it less novel by
providing an explanation. It releases interviewers from the potential anxiety
and threat of viewing an anomaly. Without acknowledgment, interviewers might
focus more on the feature as they think about why and how the stigma occurred,
giving less attention to what is being said in the interview.
In this
research, participants will view a picture of an (stigmatized) individual on a
computer in a study of technology-mediated interviews. I will use an
eye-tracker to measure participants’ visual patterns to examine if the
amount of time looking at the features of a stigma interferes with their memory
of what was said in the interview. In other words, are physical stigmas
distracting in selection interviews? Eye-trackers are used to measure eye
movements – saccades, which are fast scanning eye movements that
typically occur 3 to 4 times per second. This method provides many advantages
and the novel use of this technology will lead to new insights. First, it
provides objective and quantitative evidence of visual attention (Duchowski, 2002). Second, because of the unobtrusive nature
of eye-tracking, it would allow for the measurement of both automatic and
controlled reactions towards stigmatized individuals (Rinck
& Becker, 2006). Third, and last, such methodology would be novel in the
field of human resource management, because it introduces a new technology to
examine the selection interview setting. Thus, the proposed research and the
use of such methodology has both theoretical and
applied implications. It would allow to test if the
physical characteristics of a stigma do in fact command visual attention at a
very basic level and if such attention affects interview outcomes.
I was awarded
a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and a Society of
Industrial/Organizational Psychology Graduate student grant to complete my
dissertation
Organizational Crises, Affect, and Leadership
Response
My second line of research
examines how affect and leadership response influences attitudes and
perceptions during crisis situations:
In my master’s thesis
project, I was interested in how leaders’ emotional reactions to crisis
influence evaluations of their leadership. While existing literature on
leadership articulates the importance of leader emotion, there has been little
attention to the potential roles of more specific emotions. Emotions such as
anger and sadness have been linked to leaders in times of crisis. In this
experiment, I examined the effect of leader emotion on evaluations of
leadership in the context of a product recall of a faulty product. Participants
read a news clipping from the Associated Press, which
included a synopsis of the product recall and an interview in which the leader
expresses his emotion(s). The faulty product was a new drug that was recently
linked to cancer (similar to the recent Vioxx crisis). Results 
revealed that a leader expressing
sadness was evaluated more favorably than a leader expressing anger. I also
investigated the how leaders’ emotional expression influences the way
they are perceived as leaders from the theoretical perspective of emotional
contagion and found that participants’ emotion mediated the relationship
between leaders’ emotion and the evaluation of leaders. Furthermore, accepting responsibility for the crisis lead to more
favorable evaluations than not accepting responsibility. The findings of
this research have implications for impression management tactics a leader can
utilize. The results also have implications for implicit leadership theory
(Phillips and Lord, 1981) in that emotions may be part of individuals’
prototypes of leaders. Individuals may have assumptions of what emotion(s) a
leader should express during a crisis. This research has been published in the Leadership Quarterly.
In another
experiment, my colleagues and I examined how individuals use information of
risks and benefits to make decisions about using commercial products containing
nanotechnology and how affect influences such decisions in crises situations.
Using experimental methods, participants read a vignette in which a drug containing
nanotechnology was recently linked to liver damage. We manipulated the respond
from the FDA and management’s response to the allegations of the
findings. The results revealed that individuals were more likely to use the
medical product when the risks were low and the benefits were high. We
investigated and found that the inverse relationship between benefits and risks
is a mechanism by which individuals’ affective judgment towards
nanotechnology influences the likelihood of using a product containing
nanotechnology. Just as the affective heuristic would predict, individuals use
their feelings to make judgments – when they like something, they will
perceive more benefits and fewer risks and vice versa. This was a significant
predictor of the likelihood of using a medical product with nanotechnology even
after controlling for the FDA manipulation. In other words, peoples’ use
of risks and benefits is influential even when additional information is
introduced. Finally, individuals trust in the product increased when top
management accepted responsibility and decreased when top management denied
responsibility. This research is being prepared to be submitted to Organizational Behavior and Human Decision
Processes.