Case ReportEffective to a fault: Organizational structure predicts attitudes toward minority organizations☆
Section snippets
Attitudes toward historically marginalized populations
Social psychological theories of intergroup relations have long sought to understand the factors that influence people's attitudes toward society's marginalized and disadvantaged members (Allport, 1979, Brewer and Brown, 1998, Dovidio and Gaertner, 1986, Fiske and Taylor, 2013). Among the myriad variables identified as important predictors of people's attitudes toward minority group members are those related to individuals' generalized desire to maintain existing intergroup inequality (Jost and
Signaling efficacy through organizational structure
In becoming organized, groups of minorities may communicate to the world their ability to engage in collective action on the group's behalf, and in doing so, they may also signal their potential to threaten the unequal status quo. As unfavorable views toward minority groups may be particularly pronounced when minority group members are perceived as threatening existing social hierarchy (Jost et al., 2004), we reasoned that a minority-based professional organization that organizes itself in a
SDO-Dominance and SDO-Egalitarianism
Recent advances in Social Dominance Theory suggest that a desire to maintain social inequality can be expressed along overt and/or subtle lines (Ho et al., 2012, Ho et al., 2015, Jost and Thompson, 2000, Kugler et al., 2010). Reflecting these advances, social dominance orientation is now commonly considered to be an individual difference measure containing two sub-dimensions—SDO-Dominance and SDO-Egalitarianism—which map onto overt and subtle inclinations toward the maintenance of inequality,
Overview of current research
In two experiments, we manipulated the membership of a professional organization presented to participants, varying whether it was described as composed of minorities or not. We manipulated the organization's structure with an organizational chart that was either structured hierarchically or non-hierarchically, and measured participants' preference for intergroup inequality along both overt and subtle lines, captured by SDO-Dominance and SDO-Egalitarianism, respectively. To test whether
Pre-test
Before examining our main predictions, we pre-tested the organizational chart stimuli we planned to use in our main experiments to manipulate organizational structure, to confirm that an organization visually depicted as having a hierarchical structure is perceived to be both more hierarchical and more efficacious than an organization visually depicted as having a non-hierarchical structure.
Experiment 1
Experiment 1 examined the effects of organizational structure and participants' preference for the maintenance of existing intergroup inequality (as measured by SDO-Dominance) on support for an organization composed of African-American professionals.
Experiment 2
In Experiment 2, we sought to conceptually replicate the findings of Experiment 1 with an organization composed of a different minority group. We examined how participants' preference for inequality (as measured by SDO-Egalitarianism) and organizational structure together affected support for an organization composed of Jewish professionals. We chose Jewish Americans as our focal minority group because, in the context of the United States, Jewish Americans, unlike African Americans, are a
General discussion
In two experiments, we demonstrate that the structure of minority-based professional organizations plays a critical role in determining the nature of the relationship between a person's support for intergroup inequality and their support for those organizations. We show that an increase in preference for maintaining intergroup inequality is associated with an increased desire to limit a minority organization's access to power, particularly when that organization is structured hierarchically.
Our
Open practices
The research in this article earned Open Materials and Open Data badges for transparent practices. Materials and data for the experiments are available at http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/GDTPM.
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This research was supported by funds from the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University.