HENRICH R. GREVE
  • Home
  • Research
    • Diffusion articles
    • Institutional Legacies
  • Journals
  • Media
  • Blog
  • Q&A

Organizational musings

Hire the Second Best! When the Expert Looks Suspicious

4/1/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
It is said that one of the distinctive features of the Trump White House is the low levels of expertise of its staff, including some who are not relatives or in-laws of the president. The reason is that an overriding concern in hiring is loyalty and commitment to the president (the person) rather than the presidency, which rules out the most capable individuals who could have served holding job titles like Chief, Director, Deputy, Assistant, and Special Assistant. Of course, this focus on loyalty and commitment above all is an anomaly of the current White House… or is it?

A recent article in Administrative Science Quarterly by Roman Galperin, Oliver Hahl, Adina Sterling, and Jerry Guo has looked at how professional hiring managers select candidates and found that they typically prefer moderately high-capability applicants over extremely high-capability candidates. Why is that? When a job applicant has extremely high capability, the hiring managers question (without evidence) whether this person will be committed to the organization and motivated to work for it.

Notice what an odd kind of discrimination this is. For most kinds of employment discrimination that we know about, the people discriminated against are often different demographically than the hiring manager (so, not white, or not male), and the hiring manager can draw on cultural stereotypes to question their work capabilities. In this research, gender and racial stereotypes are not in play, and the hiring managers are fully aware that they are choosing the less-capable candidate. The problem is that they are comparing the applicants against an ideal-type hire who is good at exactly the job hired for and who will enjoy the job and stay with the organization for a long time. They are trying to predict the applicant’s future behaviors and worry that the most capable applicant sees the job as just a stepping stone to something better.

So, what can the extremely capable candidate do to get hired? One thing is to signal their commitment. The researchers were able to show that applicants with any kind of commitment signal would be more likely to be hired if they had extremely high capability than if they had moderately high capability.  For example, applicants can pay more attention to the organization’s mission than to the pay package or can tell the hiring manager that they have declined offers from other organizations. The only problem is that this is just talk, and it is not clear that actual applicants can persuade hiring managers of their organizational commitment as well as this research team could. If a hiring manager dismisses the signals of commitment as empty talk, the extremely capable candidate would again be less likely to be hired than someone less capable.

When we do research on how organizations make hiring decisions, we often encounter disappointments. The world is far from as meritocratic as we think it should be. The process documented by this research looks a lot like hiring contaminated by envy of the best candidates, and who knows, envy could be exactly what starts speculation that an extremely capable candidate isn’t good enough for the job and the organization. In any case, it is strange to see research showing that extreme capabilities can be a liability for job applicants, and it’s a reason to worry about how organizations function.

Galperin, R.V.,  O. Hahl, A. D. Sterling, and J. Guo.2019. Too Good to Hire? Capability and Inferences about Commitment in Labor Markets. Administrative Science Quarterly, published online ahead of print.
​

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Blog's objective

    This blog is devoted to discussions of how events in the news illustrate organizational research and can be explained by organizational theory. It is only updated when I have time to spare.

    Archives

    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    March 2016
    August 2015
    July 2015
    December 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
Photo used under Creative Commons from pixelmattic
  • Home
  • Research
    • Diffusion articles
    • Institutional Legacies
  • Journals
  • Media
  • Blog
  • Q&A