Guest editorial: Prejudice at work: what we understand and what we still need to learn

Citation

Randolph, A., Hinojosa, A. and Randolph-Seng, B. (2023), "Guest editorial: Prejudice at work: what we understand and what we still need to learn", Management Decision, Vol. 61 No. 4, pp. 889-895. https://doi.org/10.1108/MD-04-2023-210

“I can't breathe!” These simple, but horrific last words uttered by George Floyd in 2020 and Eric Garner in 2014 brought to the forefront of many people's minds the destructive real-life consequences of prejudice in ways that the many other cases of injustices for men, women and children of color had not (e.g. Breonna Taylor, Kayla Moore and Emmett Till). As a result, people and organizations across the globe spoke out. Businesses, religious organizations, non-profits, universities and even academic publishers made public statements around support for diversity, equity and inclusion (e.g. Emerald, https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/black-lives-matter-our-commitment).

Though the summer of 2020 brought renewed discussions of racism to public media and scholarly discussions, the negative consequences of prejudice were not new and continue to this day. Such prejudicial effects, for example, appear to influence even one's working environment (Ruggs et al., 2023). In fact, even if the intersection of prejudice and work does not always lead to physical violence, the discrimination and stereotyping that stem from it can have lasting impact on people (i.e. cognitively, emotionally and behaviorally) both inside (e.g. executives, employees) and outside (e.g. suppliers and customers) the work organization (see King et al., 2023). Thus, the purpose of this special issue was to share data and theoretical insights on understanding prejudice in the workplace. Specifically, this special issue entitled, “Prejudice at Work: What We Understand and What We Still Need to Learn”, was designed to encourage the development of theory and research within the broadly construed area of prejudice in and around paid work. Given that the majority of the world's population is employed, the potential prejudice faced in and around any type of work-related setting may have profound implications for the individuals or groups that are being targeted.

It is important to note that although we wrote the original call for papers in 2020, specifically motivated by the issues of racial prejudice and violence that at the time was receiving continual public attention (see Neuman, 1990), our call for papers was designed to encourage the exploration of the broader impacts of prejudice on various factors in work-related settings. As a result, the papers in this special issue cover insightful aspects of prejudice and work from prejudice as a concept to prejudice as it relates to areas like race, gender identity, age and attractiveness. Further, we chose to focus on the construct of prejudice instead of bias or discrimination as prejudice includes the cognitive concept of bias as well as the behavioral aspect of discrimination. Specifically, by modern definition, prejudice is a broad term that includes affective, cognitive and behavioral elements (APA Dictionary of Psychology, 2022). A deeper explanation of prejudice and how it connects to related concepts is outlined by LaVan and Lopez (this issue).

In the following section, we provide an overview of the papers in this special issue. We then summarize what we have learned as a whole from the research and theory covered. Finally, we conclude the editorial with a discussion on what is left to learn based on the contributions and future research implications of the work presented in this issue.

Overview of papers

The papers in this special issue took different approaches to investigating prejudice in the workplace. (See Table 1). The papers fall under three types: (1) examining the status of research on prejudice, (2) understanding the negative impact of prejudice and (3) interventions and preventive measures for reducing prejudice. As such, we start with papers that focus on examining existing prejudices in the workplace and then transition to papers that propose solutions to addressing the problem of prejudice in the workplace.

The first paper entitled, “An Interdisciplinary Approach to Examining Prejudice at Work: A Levels of Analysis Perspective” by LaVan and Lopez (this issue) is a literature review on prejudice across the management, psychology and sociology literature. The authors found that prejudice is under-researched in the management literature. They detailed which aspects of prejudice are the least researched across individual, team and organizational levels and make recommendations on future research on prejudice in the management domain based on the literature review, societal and organizational trends and regulatory compliance requirements.

The next paper entitled, “Hacking Attractiveness Biases in Hiring? The Role of Beautifying Photo-Filters” by Kunst, Kirkøen and Mohamdain (this issue) built on research that suggests there is a bias toward attractiveness in the hiring process and investigated the role that photo-filters play in the hiring process. The authors examined the effect of the photo-filters by gender, race and type of role. They found that beautifying filters increased perceived attractiveness and perceived competence in both men and women, but most pronouncedly for Black women.

The third paper, entitled, “The Status of Internalized Prejudice in Leader Self-Development” also highlighted the impact of prejudice in the workplace. Hogue, Knapp, Peck and Landingham (this issue) stated that cultural ideas of leadership may mean that members of marginalized groups are reluctant to engaging in self-development as a leader. They explained how culture can cause marginalized workers to internalize prejudice and how social movement principles can be a source of interventions to change organizational cultures to be more inclusive.

The next paper entitled, “Social Inequalities in Leadership: Shifting the Focus from Deficient Followers to Destructive Leaders” by Silver, King and Hebl (this issue) emphasized the role of leadership in workplace prejudice. The authors of this paper offered a novel approach to prejudice in the workplace by highlighting how leaders might play a positive or negative role in addressing prejudice at work. They assert that leaders who perpetuate inequality, with selective incivility, engage in destructive leadership; however, they also note how leaders can offer constructive leadership by engaging in allyship.

As leadership appears to be crucial in organizational direction and culture, especially as it relates to reducing prejudice in the workplace, in the fifth paper entitled, “Changing the C-Suite: Opportunities and Threats for Leadership Diversity and Equality” Whysall and Alistair (this issue) explored why leadership can be slow to change. The authors examined the decision-making processes related to evaluating and changing senior leaders in organizations. They found that the decisions related to the performance of senior leaders are subjective and based on anecdotal opinions, which inhibits organizational efforts to improve diversity in leadership roles. Also consistent with the important role leadership plays in organizational diversity, equality and inclusivity (DEI) efforts, the next paper focused on when a firm's leadership is more likely to adopt inclusive policies. The paper entitled, “Corporate Decisions on LGBT Friendliness: A Multi-level Approach” by Zhang, Shin, Choi and Kuper (this issue) examined the relationship between marketing orientation and LGBT-friendly policies. They found that marketing orientation had a positive effect on LGBT-friendly policies and was moderated by state level LGBT policies and political uncertainty.

The final two papers of this special issue specifically examined methods to reduce prejudice in the workplace. The paper entitled, “Leveraging Mega-Threats to Reduce Prejudice: A Model for Multi-Level Changes” by Waples and Botsford Morgan (this issue) presented a multi-level model that explained how societal events and environmental pressures, that call for changes in DEI practices, can lead to systemic changes in organizations and ways organizations can reinforce the changes to make them sustainable. Finally, the last paper entitled, “Developing Scientifically-Validated Bias and Diversity Trainings that Work: Empowering Agents of Change to Reduce Bias, Create Inclusion, and Promote Equity” by Cox (this issue) took an ‘In Motion’ approach (see Chen and Randolph-Seng, 2021) by arguing that DEI training is ineffective if based on assumptions that discrimination and bias result from people having incomplete information. Instead, the author proposed that DEI training grounded in empowering modifications through habit-breaking techniques can lead to sustainable changes.

What we understand

As noted in this special issue, prejudice is under-researched in the management literature (LeVan and Lopez, this issue). Nevertheless, it appears that prejudice can be based on a person's gender, sex, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, socioeconomic class, appearance, attractiveness and physical, mental and emotional abilities, to name a few. Further, the way that prejudice manifests may be different depending on the intersection of the above social identities and individual characteristics (e.g. Crenshaw, 1989). Further, given evidence of the negative impact of prejudice in the workplace, it is clear that understanding the ways prejudice is manifest and how it influences individuals within the organization as well as the organization as a whole does matter, which means that thoughtful consideration on how to circumvent prejudice to create more diverse, equitable and inclusive work environments will benefit all relevant stakeholders of the organization in question. The work in this special issue has made some strides to address these needs. As noted in Table 1, several of the papers in this special issue provided insights into the implications of different types of prejudice and suggestions for interrupting prejudice and its negative impact in organizations.

Taken together, this special issue provided several contributions to our understanding of prejudice at work. Authors in this special issue used conceptual, empirical and review articles to explore aspects of prejudice. Additionally, as a whole, the special issue provided descriptions of the state of the literature on prejudice, the varied types of prejudice and how this can impact facets of work, which in turn provides groundwork for understanding ways to intervene, interrupt and prevent prejudice in organizations.

What we still need to learn

In addition to laying out what we understand, we also sought to explore what we still need to learn. Although the special issue has further helped to broaden understanding of prejudice at work, there is still much that is unknown. The last column of Table 1 provides an overview of potential future research that could stem from each article and provides direction on what to explore next. In addition, these future research directions may help in identifying various overarching themes of what we still have yet to learn or fully understand in management research on prejudice.

Specifically, because of the varied types and implications of prejudice, many papers in this special issue focused on a single type of prejudice and its impacts. Thus, there is great promise in future research that can explore the multi-faceted nature of prejudice and interactions among types of prejudice. Many papers in this special issue, for example, note a call for future work that examines prejudice in the context of intersectional identities, which might also have implications for identity masking and code switching at work (e.g. Nath, 2011). Also, related to the examination of interactional effects of prejudice would be to examine backlash (Walby, 1993). Backlash can undermine efforts to increase diversity, inclusion and justice in organizations in order to maintain the status quo (see Chow et al., 2021).

Additionally, more research is needed that is centered on interventions. Only two papers explicitly focused on interventions in this issue; the rest of the papers have implications for interventions that are primarily discussed as implications of the model that might be explored in future research. It is helpful to map the landscape of issues around prejudice as a start, but the next steps of research should focus on building and testing interventions to address the negative impacts of prejudice noted in many of these papers.

It is also important to consider how prejudice influences what is published in scientific journals in the first place (Buchanan et al., 2021; Reyes and Halcon, 1988). If we start with the premise of Gordon Allport (1954), that all people have prejudices in the form of biases, it is important to consider how prejudice may impact scientists themselves (e.g. Bell et al., 2021; Holmes et al., 2022; Miller et al., 2021). King et al. (2018), for example, highlighted the bias against diversity scholarship in the form of hypercriticism to the content and to the social identity of the scholars, especially when the research presents ideas that are opposed to belief systems held by reviewers and editors. Avery et al. (2022) recommend training reviewers and diversifying editorial boards as a way to reduce prejudice in the publication process (see also Muzanenhamo and Chowdhury, 2021). As one exemplar, Emerald publishing group has taken several positive steps in improving DEI representation in the publication process (see https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/power-of-diverse-voices).

In addition to research on prejudice and the ways that it can manifest, it is worth mentioning that research in management would benefit from having more diversity in sample populations, even when the topic is not directly related to diversity, equity and inclusion. It is important to consider that a sample of White men is no more or less generalizable than a sample of Black women, and discussions of generalizability are highly dependent on the context of the study, much like college student samples may or may not be generalizable to the general population due to their education and social class (Gordon et al., 1986; Greenberg, 1987).

William Cullen Bryant once said, “Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again.” Given the misconceptions and distorted perceptions that often lie beneath human prejudice, it is our hope that this special issue has brought to light well informed knowledge in order to provide valuable direction to management practitioners and scholars in the increasingly diverse world we all live in.

Table 1

Overview of special issue papers

Paper	Findings and insights	Key theories	Level of analysis	Implications for future research
Status of Research on Prejudice Across Fields
LaVan and Lopez	Compares the depth of research on prejudice at the individual, group and organizational levels of analysis across management, psychology and sociology literature. Prejudice in the workplace is under-researched in several areas at each level of analysis	Various	Fields of research on prejudice	This paper highlights the need for more research on various aspects of prejudice. In addition to the forms of prejudice, future research can examine the impact of intersectionality, social movements, trends, and new policies on prejudice in the workplace from a multidisciplinary perspective
Understanding the Impact and Implications of Prejudice at Work
Kunst, Kirkøen and Mohamdain	Examines how job type and the gender and race of the applicants moderates the relationship among attractiveness, perceived warmth, perceived competence and hireability	Stereotype content model	Individual	Future research should investigate how intersectionality affects hireability across age groups, different contexts like industries and stage of the hiring process
Hogue, Knapp, Peck and Landingham	Explains how culture can impact internationalization of prejudice in leaders	Incompleteness thesis (on interaction between culture and mind)	Individual embedded in cultural context	The paper outlined how social movement principles can be applied within organizations to disrupt prejudice. Future research can empirically examine the framework and the effects of suggested interventions
Silver, King and Hebl	Conceptual typology organizing leader behaviors to address inequality around constructive and destructive leadership Inequalities in leadership must be addressed by those with power and privilege	Social identity Destructive leadership Transformational leadership	Individual Leader–follower dyad	This paper focused on the marginalized identity of women as leaders; future research can test this framework for applicability to other social identities
Whysall and Alistair	Findings from this paper illustrate the subjective nature of decisions about leadership capabilities, which can affect decision-making about leadership performance and prospects for more diversity and equality in leadership	Heuristics and biases (incumbent bias)	Individual Organizational	Future research should investigate how formalized performance evaluations for the top management team affects the evaluation process and the diversity of the leadership team. Future research could also examine how transparency and available data affects leadership selection and transitions
Zhang, Shin, Choi and Kuper	Explores how marketing orientation influences LGBT-friendly activities State-level diversity policies weaken relationship between MO and LGBT-friendly policies while country-level political uncertainty strengthens the relationship	Resource dependence theory Institutional theory Stakeholder theory	Organizational Institutional	This paper focused on marketing-oriented firms and LGBT-inclusiveness. Future research could investigate if the relationship holds true for other orientations like entrepreneurial orientation, R&D orientation, production orientation, etc. Future research could also examine if this relationship holds true for inclusion for other marginalized groups
Interventions and Preventative Mechanisms to Reduce Prejudice at Work
Waples and Botsford Morgan	Describes how environmental pressures can motivate organizations to implement changes to address social justice	Institutional Theory Institutional Logics Open Systems Theory	Individual Organizational Institutional	This paper presents a multi-level model for addressing prejudice; future research should test this model longitudinally to explore the effectiveness of the proposed model for reducing prejudice across levels
Cox	Information-deficit models of DEI training are less effective than habit-breaking approaches. Habit-Breaking training is a more effective alternative to DEI training because it is empowerment based	Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)	Individual	Future research should test how/if this approach varies across different types of prejudice and bias