Social determinants of individual performance and evaluation

This dissertation brings in perspectives in organizational theory and social psychology to enhance our understanding of what determines an individual's performance and how their performance is evaluated. It builds on a growing body of literature showing that performance is socially constructed by societal (Ridgeway, 2011) organizational (Baron and Bielby, 1980) and local-environmental factors (i.e., teams, peers) (Mas and Moretti, 2009). This active research stream comes from a variety of disciplines, each with unique assumptions and perspectives, but ultimately coalesces around a coherent argument. They dissent from the view that performance and evaluations are determined by objective factors such as achievements or effort. Instead, they think about the complex social dynamics that are involved in making sense of individuals' performance and evaluations of their performance. Situated in this dialogue, I ask, what are the social determinants of individual performance and evaluations of performance? This dissertation consists of three projects. They are laid out in the order that they are conceived. This choice is deliberate. It best reflects my intellectual journey in the past five years and how my curiosities have evolved, often building on learnings from prior inquiries. Chapter 2 argues that cultural beliefs held at the societal level, called status beliefs, shape evaluations of individual's products. This project made me curious about other domains in which status beliefs might be operative. This curiosity led to Chapter 3 (Homophily in Networking) which argues that these status beliefs shape individuals' behaviors when they search for jobs. The final chapter of my dissertation focuses on a mechanism that is at the organizational level. Chapter 4 studies how employee performance is influenced by their peers, thus theorizing about a more local determinant of individual performance. Together, these three projects demonstrate that individuals' performance and evaluations are shaped in important and at times, unequal ways by social factors that are operating at multiple levels of the environment. Gender Inequality in Product Markets (Chapter 2) explores social determinants of product evaluation. In particular, I focus on how the gender of the producer matters for the evaluations of a product. This inquiry is motivated by the persistent finding that women tend to be relatively worse off in a variety of labor market processes (Correll and Ridgeway, 2006; Goldin and Rouse, 2000; Bunderson, 2003; Castilla and Benard, 2010; Chan and Anteby, 2016). This is driven by status beliefs that tend to imbue women with inferior expectations of performance in a variety of tasks. I argue that these beliefs will extend beyond the focal actor to the products that they make. This implies that the effect of status beliefs may be more extensive than previously thought. In doing so, I develop and evaluate a theory of status belief transfer, the process by which status beliefs differentially affect the evaluations of products made by men and by women. Experiments are the ideal methodology for testing the idea because the experimenter can hold the quality of the underlying products and manipulate only the gender of the producer. I conduct three online experiments to evaluate this theory. In Study 1, I gathered 50 product categories from a large online retailer, and had participants rate each product's association with femininity and masculinity. I find evidence of the pervasiveness of gender-typing in product markets. In Study 2 and 3, I simulate male-typed and female-typed product markets (craft beer and cupcakes, respectively). Together, the two studies provide evidence of an asymmetric negative bias: products made by women are disadvantaged in male-typed markets but products made by men are not disadvantaged in female-typed markets. Evaluations of otherwise equivalent products are shaped in significant ways by social factors. This is a joint work with Shelley J. Correll and Sarah A. Soule. In Chapter 3, I theorize and test arguments about how status beliefs affect initial choices individuals make regarding with whom they interact in a job-seeking context. On the one hand, job-seekers will be attracted to recruiters who are similar on the bases of gender and race, a robust pattern known as homophily. On the other hand, status beliefs will shape the job-seeker's choice of a recruiter, thus patterns of homophily, because job-seekers are making a choice based on the perceived influence or worthiness of the recruiter. Moreover, these choices may be context-dependent because many organizations and occupations are gender-typed, which imbues greater expectations of performance and appropriateness to people of certain social categories. I test and find support for these idea using hand-collected data on 1,700+ observations of interactions between job-seekers and recruiters at college career fairs. This is a joint work with Adina D. Sterling. In the final chapter, I shift my focus away from status beliefs, which are beliefs that are broadly held, and instead consider a social factor that is more local and closer to the workers --- the quality of their peer. Workplace peers shape an employee's performance in important ways. Prevailing research shows that high-performing peers have greater positive effects on individual performance than low-performing peers. However, not all workers are affected by high-performers in the same way. I argue that the magnitude of peer effect depends on how much better or worse one's peers are relative to the focal worker. I predict that peers within a range of the worker's own performance level will induce larger performance effects than peers who are considerably better or considerably worse. Thus, I circumscribe when performance spillovers arise between peers. I test my arguments using data on call center workers at a travel agency in China. Results indicate that a worker's responsiveness to peers is shaped by the extent to which she is relatively better or worse than her peers. Furthermore, I exploit a field experiment that took place at the same organization to rule out confounders that could have generated peer effects.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Barnett William P. 
Correll Shelley Joyce 
Soule Sarah Anne
Sterling Adina