African American males in the front door but out the back door: Monitor
discharges
William M Slonaker, Ann C Wendt, Scott David Williams.
Equal Opportunities International Patrington:2003. Vol. 22, Iss. 1, p. 1-12 (12 pp.)
Abstract
While every instance of race-based employment discrimination is important, this
study finds that managers need to devote extra attention to the discharge of
male, African American employees. During the past three decades, efforts to
create fair procedures and promote perceptions of fair treatment have focused on
hiring activities, the "front door." However, this study of actual employment
discrimination claims finds that discrimination against African American men may
be particularly acute in the realm of employee discharge, the "back door." In
addition, this study suggests that the employees' immediate supervisors should
be trained and monitored in order to reduce this form of racial discrimination.
Introduction
Pragmatism and conscience make avoiding employees' perceptions
of racial biases and civil rights claims of discrimination a high priority for
proactive managers. Racial biases are particularly harmful to individuals when
they affect hiring and discharge processes-the points where people gain and lose
employment in an organization. Employees' civil rights claims are also damaging
to employers in many ways. Defending against civil rights claims decreases
workforce morale and leads to negative publicity, both of which are very costly.
Race discrimination also exacts a psychic toll on any manager with a moral
conscience.
This paper examines claims of discrimination in hiring and
discharge with attention to race as a factor. All instances of perceived
discrimination are unfortunate, but this study finds that a critical target for
managerial intervention is discrimination during discharge. Greater attention to
discharge procedures and policies might yield the greatest improvement in fair
treatment of African American men. Furthermore, training of immediate
supervisors to improve fairness of the procedures may be
particularly useful as organizations strive to eliminate discrimination.
Race Discrimination and Civil Rights in the Workplace
Whether African Americans agree or disagree with President
George W. Bush's approach to dealing with racial injustice, most agree with him
that discrimination is a problem in the U.S.: "Our Constitution makes it clear
that people of all races must be treated equally under the law. Yet, we know
that our society has not fully achieved that ideal. Racial prejudice is a
reality in America" (President George W. Bush in a speech on January 15, 2003.).
A recent poll found that while perceptions of race
relations are becoming more favorable, only 44% of African Americans describe
race relations as "good" or "excellent," and only 39% believe they have "an
equal chance at jobs" (Langer, 2003). A lack of confidence in fair treatment can
undermine career motivation and thereby create somewhat of a self-fulfilling
prophecy (Clarke, 2000; Greenberg, 1996).
Civil rights legislation prohibits discrimination on the basis
of race. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans discrimination in
hiring, compensation, and terms, conditions or privileges of employment on the
basis of race, religion, color, sex, or national origin. The law affects most
public and privateorganizations. Disparate treatment (intentional
discrimination) occurs when minorities receive different treatment than
majorities. Adverse impact (unintentional discrimination) is the result of the
same treatment applied to both minorities and majorities, but when
the outcome of that treatment is substantially less favorable for minorities.
When individuals believe they have been subjected todiscrimination they have a
right to file a claim, which triggers amulti-step investigation and enforcement
process.
Injustice at the Front Door: Unfair Hiring
Discrimination in the hiring process can take many forms
Clearly, managers who consciously intend to discriminate againstracial
minorities can reject their applications outright (Le and Kleiner, 2000). Also,
they can search the application forms and interviews to find any rationalization
for rejecting the applicant.
A variety of perceptual and judgment biases can lead to
discrimination as well (Peppas, 2002; Tomkiewicz, Bass, Adeyemi-Bello, & Voicys,
2002; Wexley & Nemeroff, 1974). Stereotyping of minority applicants causes
evaluators to selectively perceive and retain information that confirms their
existing beliefs about people from that group. The similar-to-me error causes
evaluators to have more favorable impressions of
applicants with whom they share personal characteristics. Cultural differences
in perceived appropriateness of behaviors and desirability of attributes can
also cause unfair evaluator judgments.
Effective management of a diverse workforce certainly does not
end with fair hiring procedures. Once minority employees are invited into the
front door, they must be accepted by the organization, given the same
opportunities as white employees and held to the same standards. Despite the
attention that a lot of organizations devote to fairness in hiring, much of the
discrimination employees experience occurs after they enter the front door.
Injustice at the Back Door: Unfair Discharge
While difficult to prove conclusively, the authors' findings
suggest that managers and management scholars pay much less attention to
maintaining fairness at the back door than at the front door. Consider, for
instance, the coverage of staffing versus termination in the "body of knowledge"
identified by the Human Resources Certification Institute and codified in the
Society for Human Resource Management's Learning System (Society for Human
Resource Management, 2000). Nineteen pages of the staffing module are devoted to
employee selection with an entire page on compliance issues and several
references to discrimination issues throughout. In contrast, only four pages are
devoted to involuntary
terminations including one paragraph on discrimination issues.
The authors are not aware of a comparable body of knowledge for
the broad class of the workforce that has supervisory responsibility-employees
who have the authority to direct the efforts of others and terminate those
individuals' employment relationships. There is no preeminent professional
certification for supervisors. (Supervision is not technically a profession; it
is a function performed by people of diverse vocations in all industries.)
However, we have attended and delivered training forsupervisors, and our
experience is that avoiding discrimination andmaintaining perceptions of
fairness is not a major focus of such
training. Moreover, many supervisors have never received formal training for
their supervisory duties. This is noteworthy because supervisors are commonly
involved in hiring and discharge processes in organizations, particularly
firings.
Supervisors' conscious or unconscious biases against racial
minorities can result in unfair discharge decisions. Perhaps some supervisors
wait for any excuse to terminate these individuals. They can apply the harshest
of penalties to address the employees' productivity problems, absences and
interpersonal conflicts. In contrast to minorities, majority members might
receive the benefit of the doubt in dealing with similar issues and more
reasonable treatment from their supervisors. When such injustices occur, the
costs to both the employees and their employers can be significant.
The Process and Cost of Perceived Discrimination
Whether valid or frivolous, upheld or denied, all claims of
employment discrimination are costly to employers. No research to date has
estimated how many claimants fraudulently file employment discrimination claims
when they do not truly believe that they have been victims of discrimination,
but there is no reason to believe that such instances represent a substantial
percentage of claims. Based on their analyses of the 8,051 claims of employment
discrimination, and after talking with attorneys and investigators for civil
rights agencies, the authors believe that only six to eight percent of formal
charges have no basis or are fraudulent. The authors firmly believe that the
majority of employment discrimination claims filed with civil rights commission
clearly indicate a perception of unjust treatment.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and state agencies
receive, investigate, and resolve employment discrimination claims. An employee
or applicant need only state the essential facts surrounding the claim, under
oath and with agency assistance. The agency then conducts an investigation that
may be as simple as requesting documents, or as thorough as onsite interviews.
The agency attempts to help the parties resolve the claim. If it is not
resolved, the claimant is entitled to a "right to sue" letter, which is
necessary if they wish to file a lawsuit in the courts.
The letter will be issued regardless of whether or not the agency found
"probable cause" that discrimination occurred. Cooperating with an investigation
of a claim of employment discrimination or presenting a defense in court
consumes managers' time and money.
The deterioration of employees' morale and public goodwill that
can result from perceived discrimination can also be very costly. When employees
believe that their managers have committed acts of racial discrimination, their
morale and motivation are likely to suffer. Employees who empathize with the
victim will resent management. Employees who are racial minorities themselves
may be particularly affected because, as social cognitive theory research has
demonstrated (Wood & Bandura, 1989), people tend to compare themselves to and
learn from the experiences of similar referents. Racial discrimination is also
behavior that external stakeholders (e.g., customers and investors) will often
penalize. In many instances, employment discrimination publicity has led to
customer boycotts of businesses. Similarly, socially responsible investors are
disinclined to invest in companies with a poor record of racial justice.
For these practical reasons, and because many managers are
personally committed to eliminating employment discrimination, studying
employment discrimination claims is important. We conducted this study to
identify discrimination patterns that managers will want to address.
Sample and Methodology
To better understand the current characteristics of employment discrimination, the authors have been conducting a longitudinal study, The Ohio Employment Discrimination Studies. To date, they have examined 8,051 claims of employment discrimination closed by the Ohio Civil Rights Commission (OCRC) from 1985 through 2001.
The claims were randomly drawn as a stratified random sample
(8.7%) from the 92,494 cases closed during that time. The authors used a content
analysis research method to analyze the variables (discussed in this article)
within each claim. The claims were filed under federal (85%) and state (15%)
laws, against all types of employers, whose sizes ranged from micro-businesses
to Fortune 500 firms.
Based on a comparison of sample claimants to the workforces of
both Ohio and the U.S., the findings of this research are generalizable to those
workforce populations. Women compose 44% of the Ohio and the U.S. workforces.
Ohio is seventh in the country for gross state product (Ohio Bureau of
Employment Services, 1998, p. 1-2) (U.S. Department of Labor, 2000, Table A-1).
Ohio's goods producing industries are slightly higher (at 25%), and service
producing industries slightly lower (at 75%) than those of the U.S. (20% goods
and 80% service). For Ohio, local and state government employment is about
12.5%, while nationally it averages about 13.5% of total employment (Ohio Bureau
of Employment Services, 1998, Table 2; U.S. Department of Labor, 2000, Table B-
1).
Outcomes: Front Door versus Back Door
As regards the "front door" of employment (not hired) 543 claimants (7%) in the database alleged that they were not hired. Of these, men filed 328 claims (60%), with 232 claims (43%) filed by non-Black males and 96 claims (18%) filed by Black males. Regarding the "back door" of employment (being discharged) 4,619 claimants (57%) alleged that they were fired. Of these, men filed 2,132 claims (49%), with 1,344 claims (29%) filed by non-Black males and 788 claims (17%) filed by Black males. The significance of these percentages becomes clear when workforce participation rates are considered. African-American males represent only 4% of the Ohio workforce, and only 5% of the U.S. workforce (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Thus, front door discrimination claims are 3.6 times the rate of what should be expected, and back door claims are nearly 3.4 times the expected rate.
As noted above, only 7% of all 8,051 claimants in the authors' database alleged
that they were not hired as a result of discrimination. This low rate, while
somewhat surprising, is understandable since job applicants who are rejected and
never get in the front door, never gain access to the reasons for their
rejection, or to the employer's pattern of hiring/rejecting applicants, all of
which may include discriminatory motives. Without some information and insights
concerning the potential employer's hiring/rejection practices, proving a claim
of illegal discrimination in connection with hiring becomes almost impossible.
And yet, so much of the discussion since passage of Title VII of
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has focused on the front door, i.e., hiring
minorities, particularly African Americans. However, the back door (discharges)
is another matter. First, as noted above, 57% (4,619) of all claims (8,051) in
the authors' database alleged discriminatory firing. Second, 1,411 (31 %) of the
discharge claims were filed by African Americans, including 788 (17%) being
filed by African American males. Thus, while African
American males only filed 96 front door claims, they filed more than eight times
that number (788) of back door claims. Employers need to focus on the back door.
General Characteristics of Back Door Claims by African
American Males
Table 1 [not included in this version of the article] summarizes the jobs
held by the discharged African American male claimants. By way of comparison,
note the percentages of African American male claimants in
executive/managerial-level jobs (10%) and in transportation/labor jobs (27%) as
compared to claims filed by other discharged males in those jobs, i.e., 18% and
18% respectively. Corporate America still has very few African American
executives and managers, only 41,900 (Bureau of Labor Statistics). White
Americans appear to have less favorable attitudes toward African Americans in
management positions than African Americans possess (Tomkiewicz, Adeyemi-Bello,
& Johnson, 1999), which could contribute to the glass ceiling.
Table 1 also shows a high concentration of discharges for African American males in transportation/labor jobs (27% versus 18% for non African American males). This suggests that African American males face other social economic and education barriers to entering the workforce that need to be addressed through public education and other workforce preparatory programs. One of the most significant findings by these authors is the length of employment of African American males shown the back door by the employers identified in their claims (Table 2 also not included).
Fifty-three percent of African American males who filed claims alleging
discriminatory discharge held their jobs for one year or less. Compare this to
the 32% of non-Black discharged male claimants who were employed for one year or
less. Clearly, African American males are significantly more vulnerable to
discharge during their first year of employment.
In the mid- 1990s, the authors spent considerable time interviewing Human
Resource professionals in the Southwestern Ohio region concerning workforce
diversity and workforce problems in their organizations. When asked whether
employment discrimination was a problem in their organizations, the overwhelming
response was, "No, because we are not in a hiring mode." This consistent
response suggests that even HR professionals look at race discrimination as a
front door issue. They were not aware of what happened to racial minorities
after they entered their front doors.
If African American males can survive the first year of
employment, then their chances of retaining theirjobs increases to that of non
Black males (Table 2). Thus, if employers and HR professionals want to reap the
benefits of their equal hiring opportunity efforts, they must closely monitor
what happens to African American males during their first year of employment.
Table 3 (also not shown) reports the source of the discharge, or who fired them.
Discharged African American males identified their immediate supervisor as the
source of the discriminatory discharge 53% of the time. This compares to 45% of
non African American males who identified their immediate supervisor as the
source of their discharge.
Thus, employers and HR professionals should monitor discharge
decisions made by front-line, immediate supervisors. The involvement of
higher-level supervisors (25%) in allegedly discriminatory discharges of African
American males was essentially the same (26%) as reported by non Black
discharged males. However, note the involvement of HR professionals: 10%
identified by African American males versus 15% for other males. This suggests
that perhaps HR professionals are deferring to immediate supervisors more
frequently when African American males are discharged than when other males are
discharged. At the very least, the authors suggest that HR professionals need to
have increased involvement when the discharge of an African American male is
being
considered.
Although, the authors have not identified the race of immediate or higher-level supervisors for all 8,051 claims in their database, they have identified race for several sub-sets. Consistently, 99% of the persons identified as the source of the discharge are white. This is consistent with the limited number of African American executives/managers shown in Table 1.
The authors tracked the reasons given by employers for their discharge
decisions. Table 4 reports these findings. Interestingly, the first reason,
"inadequate performance," was reported at the same rate (21 %) for non Black
discharged males. Performance is not a greater issue for African American males.
Similarly, "violation of company policy" was essentially the same for both
groups (14% African American males; 13% other males). There were few differences
for "reorganization/layoff' (7% African American males; 10% other males) and for
"attendance" (13% African American males; 9% other males). However, for one of
the employers' reasons, "disruptive behavior," there was a substantial
difference. Employers used this reason in 21 % of the discharges of African
American males, while using it only 12% of the time when discharging a non-Black
male. The authors find it hard to believe that African American males are nearly
twice as disruptive in the workplace as are other males. After having analyzed
the 788 claims of discriminatory discharge filed by African American males, the
authors have formed two opinions.
First, the authors believe that negative stereotypes influence
how supervisors and co-workers perceive African American males. Second, the
authors believe that immediate supervisors, and co-workers acting with the tacit
consent of supervisors, instigate incidents that have racial overtones.
Recommendations If organizations are going to successfully recruit, promote, and
retain African American males, white managers must be trained to accept and work
with racial minorities. Three of the top five reasons that employees consider
,very important" in deciding to
accept a job with their current employer are open communication,
management quality, and their supervisor (Galinsky, Bond & Friedman, 1993).
These factors have a tremendous impact on African-American males who believe
they are the targets of discriminatory discharge.
To defray the perception of discriminatory actions, organizations must establish clearly defined procedures for handling all involuntary terminations. These procedures must be followed prior to each discharge decision, including:
* No on the spot discharges without consultation with a Human
Resource representative;
* Review of the personnel record by at least two individuals,
including a Human Resources representative;
* Conduct a full investigation to ascertain the facts of the
issue;
* Consider mitigating circumstances, (e.g. involvement of
others, discipline assessed to other employees, previous handling
of similar situations, etc.);
* Give the employee an opportunity to tell his side of the
story;
* Consider how employees in similar circumstances have been
previously treated;
*Periodically engage the employee in conversation to confirm that
he is not experiencing discrimination;
* Understanding and valuing diversity should be part of the
organizational strategic plan and the tenant of the way the
organization does business; and
* Consider alternatives that could be invoked to remedy the
situation.
Conclusion
This study demonstrates three important patterns in the employment experiences of African American males. First, the number of African American males in the executive/managerial ranks is very low when compared to their labor force participation rate, and accordingly they only reported a small percentage of the discrimination claims in the study. Second, there is a significantly higher vulnerability of African American males to discriminatory discharge during their first year of employment. Third, this study indicates that employers perceive that African American males engage in more disruptive behavior necessitating discharge in the workplace than do nonBlack males. Clearly, organizations need to aggressively confront stereotypes that can bias discharge decisions. Many people would like to believe that race discrimination is an artifact of the past. This research suggests that, where African American males are concerned, far more needs to be done.
Biographical Sketch
Scott D. Williams, Ph.D., William M. Slonaker, JD, MBA, and Ann
C. Wendt, Ph.D. are professors in the Raj Soin College of Business
at Wright State University. Professor Williams is an assistant
professor of management and management consultant. Professor
Slonaker is an associate professor of law and serves as a mediator
for EEOC. Professor Wendt is an associate professor of management.
Professors Slonaker and Wendt serve as labor arbitrators for FMCS,
are neutrals for Ohio's SERB, are principals in Workforce
Consultants^sup TN^ providing workplace mediation and
discrimination fact-finding investigations, and are the principal
investigators for The Ohio Employment Discrimination Studies.
[Reference]
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[Author
Affiliation]
by William M. Slonaker, Associate Professor
of Business Law; Ann C. Wendt, Associate Professor of Management,
and Scott David Williams, Assistant Professor of Management, all at
Raj Soin College of Business, Wright State University, Dayton, OH
45435-0001, U.S.A.
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