Achieving Meritocracy in the Workplace Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

For their businesses to stay competitive and successful, many executives strongly believe that they should recruit and keep top talent. And to accomplish this, they must nurture meritocracies - hiring, boosting the finest people, and rewarding, based on their caliber. When managers consider their business is a meritocracy because distributive mechanisms and formal evaluative are in place, they may be really more likely to show the very biases that those systems may seek to prevent. The very belief an organization is meritocratic may open the door to one-sided, non-value-based behavior when managers make key person-level career choices. The author reports, the good news, is that creating a more meritocratic workplace does not demand an inordinate amount of time or resources.

It really is a matter of creating clear processes and standards for evaluating and hiring employees. Additionally it is an issue of bestowing an individual or group within the organization with authority, capacity, and the responsibility to ensure that those proper procedures are reasonable and tracking and evaluating the results of such company processes. The collection and analysis of data on individuals -related processes and outcomes - often called "people analytics" - can enable firms to identify and correct workplace biases. The writer ran a longitudinal investigation of the translation of employee performance evaluations at a large service organization in North America into compensation decisions. He found that, over the long run, women and minorities received salary increases that were lower than white men with exactly the same performance evaluation scores , even after controlling for manager effects, work unit, and job. The company's alternative was to adopt a set of organizational processes that included both transparency and accountability into its functionality reward system. The intervention consisted of introducing three essential changes. A performance reward committee was made to monitor the fairness of pay decisions. This process necessitated the senior managers to briefly justify how much was awarded to each employee in their work unit. Third, the performance reward committee was given the authority to modify pay choices made by senior managers. After the new system was implemented, the author seen significant decreases in the sex, race, and foreign nationality gaps for merit-based pay wages. The truth is, any remaining differences from such prejudices were minimal. Follow-up interviews with executives and managers at the firm implied that the responsibility and transparency mechanisms had not been ineffective in reducing those pay differences.

PUBLICATION DATE: July 01, 2016 PRODUCT #: SMR565-PDF-ENG

This is just an excerpt. This case is about LEADERSHIP & MANAGING PEOPLE