In a study that examined bias within the workplace, a University of Florida researcher found that those in management positions reveal explicit and implicit bias toward others from marginalized groups and infrequently express more implicit bias than individuals who aren’t in management.

The study, published this month in Frontiers in Psychology, drew from 10 years of information publicly available from Harvard University’s Project Implicit, a repository of knowledge from greater than 5 million people.

George Cunningham, professor and chair of the UF Department of Sport Management, and his co-author analyzed responses from individuals who identified themselves as managers and compared their assessments of racial, gender, disability and sexual orientation biases to those from people in 22 other occupational designations.

Stereotypes and prejudices harm workplace experiences and advancement opportunities for people from minoritized and subjugated backgrounds. While people undoubtedly experience mistreatment from coworkers and customers, our work shows that managers are also likely to specific bias, particularly in implicit forms.”

George Cunningham, professor, chair of the UF Department of Sport Management, director of the Laboratory for Diversity in Sport

Cunningham explained that while an incredible deal of research exists using the Project Implicit data, he had not seen any that compared biases amongst the various skilled categories. Since the web-based test provides occupational codes, he could compare people whose primary role is in management, like a CEO or various kinds of mid-management, to people in other employment positions.

The study’s authors learned that claims of racial, gender and disability discrimination were probably the most ceaselessly filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission between 1997 and 2021. Because sexual orientation hadn’t been a federally protected employment characteristic, they drew data from UCLA’s Williams Institute, which reports that 45% of those that discover as LGBTQ+ have experienced some type of discrimination at work.

“Once we saw that race, gender, disability and sexual orientation-based types of mistreatment are all prevalent within the U.S. workforce, we determined this warranted examination of managers’ biases in these areas,” Cunningham said.

Implicit bias occurs robotically and unintentionally, but it surely affects judgments, decision-making and behaviors, Cunningham said. Research has shown that this unintentional discrimination has implications for a lot of facets of society, including in health care, policing, education and organizational practices.

With explicit bias, individuals are aware of their prejudices and attitudes toward certain groups.

In Cunningham’s study, implicit biases were assessed using the Implicit Association Test, or IAT.

Explicit attitudes were assessed using the Feeling Thermometer, where participants responded to items measuring their attitudes toward different groups.

“With respect to explicit biases, the scores as we calculated them indicated that folks working in management occupations had an explicit bias in favor of individuals without disabilities, men relative to women working outside the house, White people and heterosexual people,” Cunningham said.

For implicit bias scores, the researchers used a previously established benchmark of degrees, including neutral, slight, moderate and powerful and located managers held a moderate preference for the groups in the bulk. The paper goes on to interrupt down the outcomes by explicit and implicit bias, by different occupations and in relation to every of the 4 targeted groups of individuals.

“Of the 176 comparisons, we found statistically significant differences in 58, or a few third of the time,” Cunningham said.

Respondents to the Project Implicit survey who identified as managers had similar levels of bias to those in what researchers called white-collar occupations, like medical doctors and people within the business and financial sector. They’d less bias than those working in physical labor and blue-collar jobs, like food production, transportation and protective services. Moreover, the managers expressed more bias than people whose job code involved bettering the human condition and protecting the environment, like educators, artists and social scientists, in keeping with the study.

“It isn’t that managers are more biased than everybody else or that they’re less biased than everybody else, but it surely’s clustered,” Cunningham said. “Our original query was, have they got biases, do they vary from others with different occupation codes, and can that impact claims that employees make? This tells us, yes, they do, and the style of bias depends not only on the main target but whether it’s implicit or explicit.”

Cunningham said their study also showed there’s a disconnect between managers’ explicit and implicit bias rankings, especially when it got here to disability. Their responses indicated they explicitly didn’t imagine that they had biases regarding individuals with disabilities, while their implicit bias regarding this group was the best of all of the others.

The worth in studies like this, Cunningham said, is to construct awareness for our implicit biases.

“The more we’re aware of it, the more likely we’re to take steps to assist lessen the impact,” he said. “Training, equity advisors, checks and balances and other practices ought to be embedded within the system -; not once-a-year activities.

“The larger issue, though, is to alter the best way our society operates,” he said. “Managers cannot do as much about how society functions, but they will do things about how their organizations function.”

Source:

Journal reference:

Cunningham, G.B & Cunningham, H.R., (2022) Bias amongst managers: Its prevalence across a decade and comparison across occupations. Frontiers in Psychology. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1034712.