Black Workers Don't Believe Excuses, Research Says
Blacks are less likely than whites to "buy" excuses from co-workers who have wronged them on the job.
That's one conclusion from research by Martin N. Davidson, assistant professor of business administration at Dartmouth College's Amos Tuck School of Business Administration and Ray Friedman, a professor at Vanderbilt University.
"Across four studies we found that when black respondents observe unjust behaviors toward a hypothetical black victim, explanations of the action had a weak impact on feelings of injustice," Davidson says.
Explanations and excuses--called "social accounts" by researchers--in earlier studies have been shown to be generally effective in managing employee perceptions of injustice. But those studies did not examine the impact of race.
When Davidson and Friedman researched the issue, they found among black managers what Davidson calls the "persistent injustice effect" which he says "results from a combination of in-group identification with the victim and personal experiences with injustice on the part of the respondent."
Their paper, "When Excuses Don't work: The Persistent Injustice Effect Among Black Managers," will be published in a forthcoming edition of Administrative Sciences Quarterly, a professional journal.
In four studies, the researchers presented respondents with a case about a manager who appeared to take credit for an idea developed by someone else and who received a bonus as a result. The respondents were asked to assume the role of an arbitrator.
All of the people reading about the case received two brief reports on the incident from the supposedly unbiased observations of other managers. Half also received a third report explaining that the manager took credit for the subordinate's ideas only after being advised that it was essential to present the idea as the manager's own if it was to get any serious consideration.
In some of the cases, the person whose idea was stolen without proper credit was presented as a black foreman. In others, the foreman was white. Distinction between black and white was made by altering surnames (Washington vs. Winston) and educational background (Howard University vs. Brigham Young University).
"We did not want to state outright that the victims were black or white since that would likely signal respondents that this was a study about race," says Dr. Davidson.
In a variety of settings, Dr. Davidson conducted his experiments with both black and white managers.
Among his findings: black managers observing blacks who had been wronged had higher feelings of injustice than black managers observing white victims or white managers observing either black or white victims.
"There is ample evidence," says Dr. Davidson, "that blacks and whites live in different experiential worlds."
"The popular press is full of recent events showing how blacks interpret very differently from whites reported mistreatment of other blacks. Examples include the Texaco tapes, the Rodney King and O.J. Simpson verdicts and reports of CIA involvement in the spread of crack cocaine to inner city communities."
The persistent injustice effect, he reports, is another example of how blacks and whites live in different realms when it comes to perceptions of injustice.
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Editors: If you would like to speak with Dr. Davidson, he can be contacted at 603-646- 3611. If you would like to see a copy of the paper, please contact Dick Jones or Steve Infanti of Dick Jones Communications at 814-867-1963. Dick Jones Communications assists The Amos Tuck School of Business Administration with some of its public affairs work.
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