Discrimination reduces work effort of those who are disadvantaged and those who are advantaged by it.

Research shows that discrimination is widespread in work organizations, yet we know little about the causal effects of discrimination on employees' work effort. Here we argue that, by decoupling effort from rewards, discrimination reduces the work effort of those who are disadvantaged by discrimination and those advantaged by it. We test these arguments against the results of five experiments designed to model promotion situations in organizations (total N = 1,184). Together, these studies show that when supervised by a manager with a discriminatory preference, both disadvantaged and advantaged workers reduce their work effort relative to a control condition where the manager is not discriminatory. The negative effect of discrimination is larger for those disadvantaged by it. These effects are mediated by employees' beliefs about how strongly work will impact their chances of reward. We then demonstrate that the relatively greater effort of advantaged-versus disadvantaged-workers in discriminatory organizations leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy: when faced with this effort differential, managers (N = 119) who did not have a priori discriminatory attitudes judged the advantaged category as more competent and deserving of workplace advancement than the disadvantaged category. Our results show that even though discrimination reduces all workers' effort, it can ultimately produce outcomes that reify and entrench discriminatory beliefs.

Ideology shapes how workers perceive and react to workplace discrimination: An experimental study on parenthood discrimination.

Employers use ideologically-tinged rhetoric to justify workplace discrimination. We argue that workers will be less likely to label biased treatment against them as discriminatory when they subscribe to those ideologies as well. We tested this prediction and the consequences of labeling for work attitudes and performance using an experiment that assigned parents to a low-status position in a work group, varying whether the decision invoked biased, ideological assumptions about parenthood. As expected, ideology drove mothers' (but not fathers') labeling. Mothers were less likely to label biased treatment against them as discriminatory when they were conservative and when they subscribed to separate spheres and ideal worker ideologies. Mothers who labeled their treatment as discriminatory had more negative work attitudes than those who did not, but also tended to appeal the decision. Ideology thus shapes whether people label discrimination when it occurs as well as their subsequent work attitudes and justice-seeking behaviors.