An organizational culture
that values meritocracy sounds good, doesn’t it? After all, we want to be
hired, evaluated, and promoted based on our own merits – as opposed to
non-performance-related factors such as our race, our gender, our network, or
our political skills. It’s all about getting what we deserve because of our
performance.
Scan the web sites of
companies and many of them make explicit reference to meritocracy. Goldman
Sachs states it is “a meritocracy built on the belief that collaboration,
teamwork and integrity create the right environment for our people to deliver
the best possible results for our clients.” One of McKinsey & Company’s
core values is to “sustain a caring meritocracy.” Similarly, one of Bank of America’s core values
is “inclusive meritocracy.” AB InBev, the beer conglomerate, claims
that its culture “is built on ownership,
informality, candor, transparency and meritocracy. We set ourselves stretch
targets and are never completely satisfied with our results.” The newly formed
Kraft Heinz Company states on its web site that “we recognize and reward outstanding
performance at every level, in the true spirit of meritocracy. In 2014 alone,
more than 1,000 employees were promoted as a result of their high performance
and value creation.” And there is GE, which has meritocracy as one of its
values, which they define as “creating opportunities for the best people from around the
world to grow and live their dreams.”
Not
only employers but most employees also seem to value meritocracy. According to Ready et al. (2010), this is one of the
factors that attracts talent in emerging markets. In my experience, I have also
found that young professionals in Asia find the seniority-based system in many
Asian firms to be hampering their advancement opportunities, and they want more
recognition for their hard work and performance. In fact, when China recruited
for its civil service examinations starting around the seventh century, it
introduced a merit-based system. The exam was based on classical literature and
philosophy, and candidates were selected based on their exam scores. Of course,
there were many people from the lower classes who did not have the educational
background to compete, and women were excluded from applying. In principle,
however, the concept was based on a meritocracy.
Yet there are significant barriers to creating meritocracy in
organizations. First, organizations may say they value it but their practices
might not necessarily reflect this. Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith (2004)
has written about how leaders subtly encourage (and by implication, reward)
those who fawn over and suck up to them. According
to a recent survey by Right Associates (Lauby, 2012), 44%
of employees believe the key to their success lies in “who you know,” and not
job performance (39%). Other employee surveys show similar results,
despite the prevalence of organizational practices such as performance
appraisal systems. In a 2014 survey of
over 356,000 U.S. federal employees, 54% disagreed with the statement that
“pay raises depend on how well employees perform their job.” (fedrev report,
2014) In their excellent book, The
Meritocracy Myth, McNamee and Miller (2004) point to social capital (“whom
you know”) and cultural capital (“what you need to know to fit into the group”)
as important non-merit factors that influence life outcomes:
“It helps to have friends in high places, and the higher up one starts
in life the greater the probability that one will travel in high-powered social
circles. One must also have the cultural wherewithal to be fully accepted
within these high-powered social circles. Those who are born into these circles
have a nonmerit cultural advantage over those not born into these circles …”
(p. 198)
Second,
as Castilla and Benard (2010) have argued, emphasizing meritocracy might
unintentionally introduce bias and create inequity in the distribution of
employee rewards. Their research suggests that “… in contexts in which people
are led to feel that they are unbiased, fair, or objective, they are more
likely to then behave in biased ways.” (p. 547); they refer to this as the “paradox
of meritocracy effect.” Why does this happen? Two mechanisms seem to be
operating. One is through the concept of moral credentials. If you believe you
have established your credentials as a non-prejudiced person, you are more
prone to express prejudiced attitudes.
Similarly, if you believe strongly that your organization values and
endorses meritocracy, then you must therefore not be biased and must be making
your decisions based solely on merit. The second mechanism is through
self-perceived objectivity. If you believe that you are an objective person,
then you may not realize that you may be acting on your prejudices. And we all
have conscious and unconscious biases. So the paradox here is that if you
believe in meritocracy you might be more likely to behave in biased ways.
Third,
we are subject to the fundamental attribution error, which is the tendency to
overattribute other people’s behavior to internal rather than to external causes,
and one’s own success to internal rather than external causes. Those who have
made it and who are successful believe that it is due to their hard work and
because they got there through their merits. They also believe that internal
factors such as aptitude or motivation are the causes for others not succeeding,
rather than external circumstances.
A fourth
barrier is around our unconscious biases, especially related to (but not
limited to) race and gender. As an example, Samson (2013) conducted a survey-based
experiment in which half of the sample of White respondents in California were
asked about the importance of GPA (a merit-based variable) as a factor for admission
to the University of California. The other half received the following
information prior to the question: Under current admissions procedures in the
University of California system, Asians make up almost 40% of the student body
(or 2 out of every 5 students), while they are only 12% of the California
population (p. 240). His results showed that individuals’ acceptance of merit-based
admission varies as a function of their perception of “group threat” and not
just perceptions of fairness. In other words, when group threat is primed (as
it was in half the subjects), these White subjects tended to decrease the
importance of a merit-based variable like GPA as a factor in admissions. He
concludes that commitment to meritocracy may be based not solely on principle
but varies “… depending on the outgroups under consideration and the extent of the
group threat they pose to Whites.” (p. 253)
In an
interesting set of studies, Uhlmann and Cohen (2005) showed that individuals
use different criteria to define merit that fits their own preconceptions and
biases. For example, in one study, they asked participants to rate the
strengths of male and female applicants for the job of police chief.
Applicants’ credentials and gender were manipulated. Credentials were either
strong on being streetwise (e.g., working in tough neighborhoods, getting along
with fellow officers, poorly educated) or on being educated (e.g., experienced
in administrated, well educated, did not get along so well with fellow
officers). The participants then rated the importance of several hiring
criteria, and whether the applicant should be hired. What they found was that
educated characteristics were more important when the male applicant had them
than when he did not. Educated characteristics were less important when the
female applicant had them. In fact, male and female participants
constructed criteria favorable to the male applicant. Because the job of a
police chief is traditionally male, the participants defined merit in a way
that favored male over female applicants.
As
reported in the Wall Street Journal (Silverman, 2015), the Clayman Institute
for Gender Research at Stanford has been analyzing hundreds of performance
reviews in several technology companies. So far, researchers have found that
women received 2.5 times the amount of feedback men did about aggressive communication
styles (e.g., suggesting that they pipe down and be less aggressive), while
men’s reviews contained twice as many words related to assertiveness,
independence, and self-confidence (e.g., “drive,” “transform,” “tackle”). In
addition:
“… women’s reviews had
more than twice the references to team accomplishments, rather than individual
achievements … while men … received three times as much feedback linked to a
specific business outcome and twice the number of references to their technical
expertise.”
Fifth,
the criteria for determining merit can vary by company and by culture. Being
promoted in some Asian companies means that you have to be able to speak
English very fairly well. Many companies look at factors other than performance
to determine who gets hired, rewarded and promoted, and arguably some of these factors
are more subjective than others, as well as being weighted differently by
different raters. For example, in identifying those who might be the future
leaders of the company, executives might consider performance, but often look
at other factors, such as interpersonal skills, that elusive quality called
executive presence, and perhaps even the advocacy of other executives who might
have mentored these individuals. Aren’t some of these “non-merit” factors?
McNamee and Miller (2004) give a detailed example of their own experience
selecting a new faculty member for their department, and they conclude:
“… we call into
question the presumption that people know merit when they see it. … it is a
cardinal principle in meritocracy that the ‘most’ qualified or ‘best’ person
should be hired for the job … However, we argue that it is often difficult or
impossible to ‘know’ who the ‘best’ is.” (p. 43)
What
can organizations do? First, and the most basic, is to make sure their practices
are consistent with their statements about merit. Do their performance and
reward systems clearly reinforce excellence and high performance? They can conduct
periodic surveys or pulse checks to determine what employees’ perceptions are,
instead of simply relying on making pronouncements. Second, make these
practices and processes more transparent by defining more clearly what
excellent performance is, and why it matters. For example, if behaviors in
addition to performance are used as criteria for rewards and promotions, make
these explicit, and build in safeguards to minimize subjectivity.
Third,
hold managers accountable. Have processes in place to make sure that managers
evaluate and reward employees based primarily on performance and other
merit-based factors. There is a lot of research evidence from studies of small
groups that meritocratic hierarchies (for example, when individuals in groups
are given higher rank because of their task expertise) predict group success
(Anderson and Brown, 2010).
Fourth,
raise awareness of unconscious biases. According to the Wall Street Journal (Lublin,
2014), as many as 20% of large corporations with diversity programs (including
Chubb, Genentech, Google, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Roche and T. Rowe Price) now
provide training on unconscious bias. Other companies (e.g., Microsoft) provide
guidelines to managers before they write up their performance reviews to remind
them about gender bias. There is some
evidence that such training might be helpful. Of course efforts to consider
diversity in hiring and promotion decisions should continue. Especially
important is making sure that there is diversity in the pool of candidates
being considered. Most White senior executives when considering successors for
their positions or those within their team might favor first those who they
perceive to be like them (the “similar-to-me” bias). With a more rigorous
screening process, organizations can make sure there are candidates who may be
just as qualified but who may not be on their radar screen – and some of them
might be female and people of color.
Fifth,
as much as possible, define criteria for merit up front and get agreement from
evaluators on what the indicators for these criteria are. This will reduce
individuals’ tendencies to emphasize qualifications that tend to fit their
biases. When working with organizations on evaluating their future leaders, make
it a practice, as my colleagues and I do, to gain agreement with the executive
team on what success looks like in concrete terms.
It is
clearly not enough for organizations to simply state that they have a
meritocratic culture. In fact, the reality is that it is very difficult for any
organization to achieve this ideal, although it is well worth the effort. The
current debates about wage and income inequality touch on the difficulties of
achieving meritocracy in societies. However, companies that are serious in
attracting and retaining talented employees need to continue to make serious efforts
to eliminate these barriers.
Anderson,
C. and Brown, C. (2010). The Functions and Dysfunctions of Hierarchy. In A. P.
Brief and B. Staw (Eds.), Research in
Organizational Behavior, 30: 55-89. New York: Elsevier.
Castilla,
E. and Benard, S. (2010). The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 55:
543-576.
Kaplan,
S. (2015). Meritocracy: From Myth to Reality. Rotman Magazine, Spring, 49-53.
Lublin,
J. (2014). Bringing Hidden Biases into the Light. Wall Street Journal, January
9: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303754404579308562690896896
Lauby,
S. (2012). For Your Career, It’s Not What You Know – It’s Who You Know. http://blog.shrm.org/blog/for-your-career-its-not-what-you-know-its-who-you-know
Samson,
F. (2013). Multiple Group Threat and Malleable White Attitudes Towards Academic
Merit. Du Bois Review, 10(1):
233-360.
Silverman,
R. (2015). Managers: Watch Your Language. Wall
Street Journal, September 30 2015.
Uhlmann,
E. and Cohen, G. (2005). Constructed Criteria: Redefining Merit to Justify
Discrimination. Psychological Science,
16 (6): 474-480.
