The following is a paper I wrote for my PUAD 520 Organizational Theory Class.
What It Takes To Get Along
How a manager breaks his/her department
into groups/teams can greatly affect the speed and quality of their work. You
can have the same 25 people broken up 4 different ways, and you will get 4
variations of their finished product/service. They’re the same people, same
work, same environment, the only thing that has changed is how they were
organized. Now let’s move to a seemingly unrelated subject, then, tie the two
together. The second concept is that the gender dynamics of companies and
organizations are drastically changing. What is meant by that is that some
sectors of the economy that have been traditionally male dominated are now less
male dominated. At the same time, there are other sectors of the economy, such
as construction, that has been traditionally male dominated and continues to be
male dominated. The point is that every variation of the number of males and
females working in every sector of the economy is different. This means from no
change to a drastic change, and all in-between, this is what happening. It’s
not all one thing or not all one another. So what is the tie between these two
concepts? The tie is my main question that I seek to answer in this paper: Does
the ratio of male to females in a group/team affect the quality and speed of
their work?
None of the sources solve the
question directly. One assumes that no one has asked this question before,
because the research and sources touch on the subjects related to the question,
but that is the extent. One has to gather all of the conclusions from all of
the sources together and then will see the answer, if there even is one. The
first journal is “Think Crisis–Think Female: The Glass Cliff and Contextual
Variation in the Think Manager–Think Male Stereotype” by Michelle Ryan,
Alexander Haslam, Mette Hersby and Renata Bongiorno. The title can be
confusing. It is asking that in a time of crisis for a company or organization,
is it better to have female or male managers? The study and data showed that
managers that showed typical male behavior and managerial traits were better in
companies that were successful at the time they became managers. Conversely,
managers that showed typical female behavior and managerial traits were better
in companies that were not successful at the time they became managers.
So what does this have to do with my
question? It only answers part of the question. No study has asked my exact
question; the chances of that happening are very rare for any
psychological/behavioral question. The best we can do is piece together
conclusions from different studies and come up with a general answer. So this
study says that if your company/organization is doing bad, it is better to have
female managers. However, what may seem like a proponent of female managing
styles is actually something wrong. The “why” question is important. Why are
female managers better than male managers in a company/organization that is
doing bad? The study found that the answer is “Because it is easier to blame
them for the company/organization’s failure.” So the only reason why they are
considered better is to be scapegoats. That really doesn’t do anything for
women’s rights in the workforce, and definitely doesn’t answer my
question.
Another problem with this study is
that it fails to define what “typical female manager behavior” and “typical male
manager behavior” is. It’s open to the reader’s interpretation. What you might
think typical behavior is may be totally different than what I think is
typical. And even if there is a general agreed upon consensus in a society, I
may disagree with the consensus. The fact that I’ve seen men act in every
possible manner regarding management leads me to believe that there is no
typical male manager behavior, only out-dated stereotypes. Likewise, I’ve seen
women act in every possible manner regarding management. That leads me to
believe that there is not typical female manager behavior, only what society
thinks they are based on archaic cultural bias.
The second study is called “Challenging
Conventional Wisdom About Who Quits: Revelations From Corporate America” by
Peter Hom, Loriann Roberson, and Aimee Ellis. This study found that women quit
their jobs/switch jobs more often than men. This is across all other
demographical characteristics, such as a race, class, or religion. Why do they
do so? There is no one answer; there is a whole bunch of reasons. But most of
them do it only a year on the job. We can infer that means that they had wrong
expectations about the job, found out it was something different then they thought
it would be, and they went on to find something else.
Unfortunately, this tells us even
less about our question than the first study does. As the concept of all these
women entering all of these workforces is relatively new in comparison to all
of human history that we’ve been working, there are very little answers to be
found. It’s not an issue that we have been studying for centuries. The only tie
in that I can find is that, as a manager, you may think twice about hiring a
lot of women to positions that are critical to your company/organization. Why?
Because they quit more often soon after you hire them.
But do the studies actually justify
thinking that way as a manager? People could see that as a sexist attitude
towards hiring, even if there is data to back it up. So unfortunately, the
findings are too limited to actually base a policy or mindset towards it, in my
opinion. As always in Public Administration, there is more research that needs
to be done.
Peter Blau had hypothesizes on
macrosocial theories, which this issue falls under. He published his findings
in an article called “A Macrosociological Theory of Social Structure.” Amongst
his various conclusions is one that is pertinent to my question. He found that
social groups had less interaction with other social groups that were radically
different than they were. So, Protestants and Catholics had a lot of
interaction. Their religious differences are slight, and they share many
demographical characteristics in common such as race, income, etc. Overall,
Blacks and Jews did not have a lot of interaction because things like their
religion and income were often very different.
So what does this mean for our
question? More interaction between people usually means they get along more.
People don’t interact with other people that they hate unless they have to. So
it’s logical to assume that a lot of voluntary interaction means that person A
and person B like each other. This means that woman A in a company will, more
likely than not, work well with woman B if some of their other factors, like
religion, lifestyle, personal networks, etc, are similar. Their gender has
little or nothing to do with it. This study is suggesting that the ratio of men
and women doesn’t mean a lot when it comes to performance, because it is only
one of many factors that play into how well people work together and their
performance levels.
This runs in line with what we
learned in class about diversity. Skin deep aspects, such as gender, race, etc,
are less important than deeper aspects of a person. That’s where true diversity
lies. So if you want your workers to work well together, don’t focus on the
ratio of men and women. Get a group of like-minded people who have some things
in common and they’ll most likely work great together.
Rosabeth Kanter did research
pertaining to my exact question, in her article “Some Effects of Proportions on
Group Life: Skewed Sex Ratios and Responses to Token Women.” In short, she
studied groups of workers with different ratios of men and women: sometimes it
was 9/1 male to female, 7/3 male to female, or 5/5 male to female ratios. After
she observed them working for a while, she found that in the groups with the
fewest amount of women, the 9/1 ratio group, the women were mostly excluded
socially from the men. Their input wasn’t taken into consideration, the men
just cared about their looks, they had to work twice as hard for the same
amount of credit, etc, all negative consequences of the 9/1 ratio. The “logic”
behind the men’s behavior, that Kanter goes on to explain, is that since the
women were such a small minority in the company that the men did not need them
as allies to get their work done, so they didn’t even try to be nice to them.
In ratios like 7/3 or 5/5, women consisted enough of the company that they were
needed quite often to get any work done, so men included them in projects,
valued their input, treated them like the normal human beings that they are,
credited their work duly, etc, all opposite of when the ratio was 9/1.
Kanter’s explanations seem to say
that if, the roles were reverse, and women had the majority in the company,
that they would do the same thing to men. Neither gender is more “mean” or
self-centered than the other; what only matters is the ratio between men and
women. This makes sense because in companies that I’ve worked for where there
are very few males or my age is significantly higher or lower than the medium
age of most of the other employees, my input was not taken, my achievements
weren’t taken as seriously, etc. You can substitute gender for age, race,
religion, etc, any identifiable trait a person can have can potentially be
inserted into this ratio explanation that Kanter figured out through her
studies.
This data paints a dismal picture of
human behavior. It suggests that people are only nice to other people when they
see something that they can gain from that friendship. So, the men aren’t nice
and fair to the women because they possess good human qualities, they’re only
doing that because they see some benefit for themselves. I can’t think of any
other explanation because between all the groups, the only thing that changed
was the ratio between men and women.
Kanter has some suggestions for
managers who want to minimize this problem potentially happening in their
office/organization. The first one is to have a “sponsor.” A sponsor is a
person who represents the majority group. The sponsor maintains dialogue to the
minority group and works out any problems that the minority group has in working.
I would suggest having a higher requirements in the ethics of the people you
hire. It’s despicable that people will turn on one another simply because of a
numbers game. I treat people with respect, value their work and input no matter
how many people of the same gender work in my company. It’s not that hard, and
not too much to expect from your employees. I wouldn’t care how good of an
employee you were, if you started being unfair towards a person just because of
their gender/race, etc, then I wouldn’t want you to work for me.
A solution that seems obvious but
actually doesn’t work is to simply hire more of the minority group so that
their proportion is better, so the majority group will treat them nicer. The
reason why that doesn’t work even though it does solve the proportion problem
is explained in Gillian Ranson’s “Gender, Earnings, And Proportions of Women.”
Her study is about organizations that sought out to hire more women, for
diversity purposes. However, she found that the companies hired less educated
and less experienced women, compared to their male co-workers, in order to meet
these diversity purposes.
This is problematic for several
reasons. One, it means, in the name of diversity, companies hired less educated
and less experienced people on purpose, passing up a person who would be a
better employee. This means the quality and speed of the company’s work will
diminish. This is the case against hiring for skin level diversity, a.k.a.
race, gender, age, etc. A better hiring practice, for example, would be to hire
people based on their diversity of outlooks on life, which would lead to
different ways of thinking to solve problems. Diversity under the skin, such as
emotions, personal networks, attitudes on life, etc, we learned in class, is
what matter more than skin level diversity. This claim has been backed up by
the studies we read in class pertaining to diversity.
Secondly, hiring less competent
females to these positions will only reinforce the male bias in the workers
that are already there. They’ll think “Geez, every woman they’ve hired in this
department doesn’t know how to do her job well.” This will reinforce their
belief that woman don’t know how to do this particular job, because he’ll point
to the facts to back up his claim. A better practice would to only hire
competent females, to disprove their bias. A man might think a woman can’t
possibly know how to do his job, but once a woman is hired in his office and
does a good job, that will break and disprove his mental bias.
An article published by several
authors, titled “Exploring the Asymmetrical Effects of Gender Tokenism on
Supervisor–Subordinate Relationships,” explores further into the concept of how
“token” people work in an office. Token meaning you are the only one of a
certain category, either your race, gender, religion, etc. The authors
conducted surveys on a number of people. They found that when women were
proportionally underrepresented, they reported feeling less supported by female
supervisors than male supervisors. This seems to run contrary to normal human
behavior, as one would think that since women were fewer in number than men in
these organizations, that the women would look out for each other more. But the
opposite happens. Maybe that’s because humans are rarely ever rational. Maybe
it’s because the female supervisors were so busy looking after themselves,
trying to survive as a minority, that they honestly didn’t have time to
properly support the female workers. As with much of human behavior, unless we
asked every single female manager in the study specifically why they didn’t do
xyz, we simply won’t know the reason why.
Being a token seemed to hurt women
more in other ways as well. The article continues with a second study, and
found that showed that women who perceived they were gender tokens in their organization
were less likely to support an outstanding female subordinate than an identical
male. Again, another instance of a perceived minority shooting themselves in
the foot. The study showed no reason as to why this has to be a female only
problem; then one would logically assume that if men were the minority in an
organization, then they would do the same thing too, unfortunately.
Amanda Koch, Susan D. Mello, and
Paul Sackett talked about gender bias in what is to be considered “male
dominated jobs” and “female dominated jobs.” Their study was titled “A
Meta-Analysis of Gender Stereotypes and Bias in Experimental Simulations of
Employment Decision Making.” In English, that meant they looked at who had more
“bias”: females in majority male job positions or males in majority female job
positions. They found that the latter had more bias than the former.
But what do they mean by bias?
Unfortunately, the authors were not clear on that, and that is a major problem
with this study. “Bias” is a non-tangible concept that is abstract and is not
quantifiable. Therefore, it up to the opinion of what the authors think is a
bias, based off of, their words,: “the effects of decision-maker gender, amount
and content of information available to the decision maker, type of evaluation,
and motivation to make careful decisions on gender bias in organizational decision.”
That means gibberish to the average person, so when the average person doesn’t
understand your terms, it is easy to manipulate findings to suit what you want
those findings to say.
What does this mean for the average
manager? Let’s say the authors were right. That means you, as a manager, have
to be extra careful and be on the lookout for these bias if you run an
organization/department that is majority female, and then, you hire some males
to come and work there. That, the authors say, is the instance where there is
the most potential for gender bias that negatively affects everyone. You have
to be vigilant to snuff it out before it causes a real loss in productivity or
some other negative aspect is affecting your department/organization.
In the article titled “Who Gives?
Multilevel Effects of Gender and Ethnicity on Workplace Charitable Giving,”
authors Lisa Leslie, Mark Snyder, and Theresa Ghomb look at the effects that
gender have on how much a worker donates to “work related charity.” They talk
about ethnicity too, but that is not related to the topic, so we’ll just focus
on the findings related to gender. They find that women usually give more than
men. That means that if you’re a manager and you want workplace charity to
increase, then you’ll hire more woman.
A rather interesting study was done
about apologizing in the workplace. This may seem trivial at first glance, but
apologizing has a great influence on how well people can work together, i.e.
productivity. In “Do you really expect me to apologize? The impact of status
and gender on the effectiveness of an apology in the workplace,” the study
finds that an
apology
is most effective when the apologizer is a male, a manager, or is a male apologizing
to a female.
So do any of the findings from these
studies have any specific actions that a manager can take to make sure his/her
workers get along? Technically, yes they do, but the problem is, which ones do
you pay attention to and which ones do you ignore? If you pay attention to all
of the findings, it’ll be impossible because they clash with each other. One
study tells you to not have tokens, because that will cause problems. But then
you also can’t just hire people based on their race/gender/religion, etc, to
avoid tokens, because then you might get incompetent employees. And it goes on
and on like this. All of the studies looked just as valid as the others. How
could you choose which ones to follow and which ones not to?
My takeaway from all of these
studies are that the findings are interesting, and should be kept in the back
of one’s mind as a manager to help and avoid conflicts in the workplace. But
none of them are definite enough to shape behavior. There are so many other
factors at work at all aspects of work. That is the problem I have with
organization theory, and social science on the whole. What findings people find
rarely can translate into actual actionable steps in the real world because the
real world has too many other factors to consider when making managerial
decisions. To hire or not hire someone because their gender is better/not
better at apologizing to managers is bizarre and will get you laughed at by any
co-worker that you tell. That’s because you’re taking one factor and putting it
above all other factors when making a hiring decision. So to answer the
original question: “Does the ratio of male to females in a group/team affect
the quality and speed of their work?” the answer is: Yes, it does, but none of
the studies show what ratio will eliminate all potential problems.
A better hiring practice would be to
have the employees conducting the interviews be a very good judge of character.
You want employees who honestly want to do a good job, are flexible, tolerant,
not bigots, respectful, don’t freak out at little things, etc. These may seem
like no brainers, but yet so many companies have employees who are none of the
above. That is because the hiring interviewer was not a good enough judge of
character in the interview. They thought the candidate had these certain
qualities, but they didn’t. I would much rather work with a person who has
these qualities, no matter their race, religion, gender, etc. Like previously
mentioned, these qualities in a person would make them respectful and thoughtful
to another employee who is a token in the organization. There, you just solved
the “token problem” that the studies talked about, without having to follow all
of these complicated suggestions from the findings of the studied. You just
hired good people, and the rest just followed naturally.
Sources
Blau, Peter. “A Macrosociological
Theory of Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 83, No. 1
(Jul., 1977), pp. 26-54.
Hom, Peter. “Challenging
Conventional Wisdom About Who Quits: Revelations From
Corporate
America.” Journal of Applied Psychology. 2008, Vol. 93, No. 1, 1–34.
Kanter, Rosabeth. “Some Effects of
Proportions on Group Life: Skewed Sex Ratios and Responses to Token.” American
Journal of Sociology. Vol. 82, No. 5 (Mar., 1977), pp. 965-990Published
Koch, Amanda. “A Meta-Analysis of
Gender Stereotypes and Bias in
Leslie, Lisa. “Who Gives? Multilevel
Effects of Gender and Ethnicity on Workplace
Charitable
Giving.” Journal of Applied Psychology. 2013, Vol. 98, No. 1, 49–62.
Ranson, Gillian. “Gender, Earnings,
and Proportions of Women: Lessons from a High-Tech Occupation.” Gender and
Society. Vol. 10, No. 2 (Apr., 1996), pp. 168-184.
Ryan, Katherine. “Exploring the
Asymmetrical Effects of Gender Tokenism
on
Supervisor–Subordinate Relationships.” Journal of Applied Psychology. 2012, 42,
S1, pp. E56–E102.
Ryan, Michelle. “Think Crisis–Think
Female: The Glass Cliff and Contextual Variation in the Think Manager–Think
Male Stereotype.” Journal of Applied
Psychology. 2011, Vol. 96, No. 3, 470–484.
Walfisch, Tamar. “Do You Really Expect
Me To Apologize? The Impact of Status and Gender on the Effectiveness of an
Apology in the Workplace.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology. Volume 43,
Issue 7, pages 1446–1458, July 2013.
