Paying to Reduce Disparity: Financially Incentivizing Workforce Diversity and Its Effects on Managers’ Promotion Decisions and Employees’ Effort
实验研究管理者获得多样性激励（为增加弱势群体晋升而设的奖金）如何影响其晋升决策和员工努力，发现激励能增加弱势群体晋升，但未获晋升的员工会降低努力。
ABSTRACT Companies are offering managers compensation incentives to increase promotions of under-represented employees to higher level organizational positions (hereafter, “diversity incentives”). This study uses an experiment to examine how diversity incentives affect managers’ promotion decisions and employees’ effort choices before and after those decisions. The results suggest that managers’ diversity incentives do not affect employees’ pre-promotion effort choices. Additional analyses indicate that both over- and under-represented employees expect managers to promote them based on effort instead of group membership. Consistent with predictions, diversity incentives increase the likelihood that managers promote under-represented employees whose pre-promotion efforts are comparable to their over-represented colleagues’ efforts. After the promotion decision, nonpromoted employees whose managers receive diversity incentives choose the lowest effort, regardless of group membership. Collectively, these results inform companies about the potential costs and benefits of using diversity incentives by demonstrating that diversity incentives can increase diversity in promotions but reduce nonpromoted employees’ efforts. Data Availability: Data are available from the author upon request.