Off-campus UNL users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your NU ID and password. When you are done browsing please remember to return to this page and log out.
Non-UNL users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Paying to Reduce Disparity: Financially Incentivizing Workforce Diversity and Its Effects on Managers’ Promotion Decisions and Employees’ Effort
Abstract
Disparities in employee representation persist in higher-level organizational positions despite recent attention to workforce diversity and its associated benefits. In response, companies have begun integrating diversity initiatives with varying degrees of specificity (hereafter, “initiative specificity”) into their managers’ compensation packages to increase underrepresented employees’ representation in higher-level organizational positions. This study uses an experiment to examine how offering managers financial incentives to accomplish diversity initiatives (hereafter, “diversity incentives”) and initiative specificity interact to influence managers’ promotion decisions and employees’ effort choices in a promotion setting.The results suggest that as underrepresented employees’ pre-promotion efforts increase relative to overrepresented employees’ efforts, diversity incentives increase managers’ likelihood of promoting underrepresented employees. Diversity incentives also increase managers’ extrinsic diversity motives, which prior research suggests may adversely affect their prejudice regulation in the workplace. Initiative specificity does not affect managers’ promotion decisions or extrinsic diversity motives.I also find that employees choose similar pre-promotion efforts regardless of their group membership or managers’ diversity incentives. Responses to post-experiment questions suggest that employees expect managers to promote them based on effort instead of group membership. After the promotion decision, non-promoted employees whose managers receive diversity incentives choose the lowest effort. This study adds to the growing literature examining how to advance diversity within higher-level organizational positions and clarifies how incentives interact at different hierarchical levels within a company.
Subject Area
Accounting|Labor economics|Management
Recommended Citation
Sheeley, Bret S, "Paying to Reduce Disparity: Financially Incentivizing Workforce Diversity and Its Effects on Managers’ Promotion Decisions and Employees’ Effort" (2024). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI30991005.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI30991005