The Production of Merit: How Managers Understand and Apply Merit in the Workplace
Name
merit_castilla_ranganathan.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
912.16 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
89fc846048de31b334d1fa8fec1acf0e
Author(s)
Castilla, Emilio J
Ranganathan, Aruna
Date Issued
2020
Journal
Organization Science
Publisher
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Copyright: © 2020 INFORMS In this article, we develop a process model that specifies how managers come to understand and approach the evaluation of merit in the workplace. Interviews from a diverse sample of managers and from managers at a U.S. technology company, along with supplemental qualitative online review data, reveal that managers are not blank slates: we find that individuals' understandings of merit are shaped by their (positive and negative) experiences of being evaluated as employees prior to promotion to management. Our analysis also identifies two distinct managerial approaches to applying merit when evaluating others: the focused approach, in which managers evaluate employees' work actions quantitatively at the individual level; and the diffuse approach in which managers assess both employees' work actions and personal qualities, quantitatively and qualitatively, at both the individual and team levels. We further find that, as a result of their different past experiences as subjects of evaluation, individuals who experience mostly negative evaluation outcomes as employees are more likely to adopt a focused approach to evaluating merit, whereas individuals who experience mostly positive evaluation outcomes are more likely to adopt a diffuse approach. Our study contributes to the scholarship on meritocracy and workplace inequality by showing that merit is not an abstract concept but a guiding principle that is produced and reproduced over time based on individuals' evaluation experiences in the workplace.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1287/ORSC.2019.1335
