The impact of racial representativeness within human resources on employee perceptions that the hiring process is fair
研究美国联邦政府27个组织的数据发现，人力资源部门中黑人或亚裔等群体的代表性增加反而降低了员工对招聘公平的信心，挑战了代表性官僚理论。
It is not enough for a hiring process to be equitable, for the organization to be healthy, employees must also believe that the process is fair. Merit-based assessment should provide greater assurances of fairness, but do not always translate into employee confidence in the process. The theory of representative bureaucracy holds that when individuals are represented by officials with decision-making power, they feel more confident that the process will be fair. This study examines whether racial/ethnic representation within HR increases employee confidence in the organization’s hiring process. To do so, it uses multi-level modeling to examine this relationship across employees within 27 organizations in the U.S. federal workforce. Contrary to theory and popular opinion, increased HR representation among Black/African-American, Asian, and White employees is associated with lower confidence that the organization either engaged in fair and open competition, selected the best qualified candidate, or recruited a diverse pool of applicants. This means confidence in the hiring process is not simply traced to current levels of under- or over-representation, employee perceptions of fairness are more nuanced. This prompts the question: How does an organization increase employee confidence in the hiring process if a more representative HR leads to negative results?