Cheating constraint decisions and discrimination against workers with lower financial standing

Abstract

Workers with lower financial standing face many personal challenges due to the relatively lower level of material resources they have at their disposal. We propose that lower financial standing not just impacts workers themselves, but also engenders discrimination from supervisors. Drawing on social cognition principles, we forward a situational inference perspective whereby supervisors make a naïve inference that workers with lower financial standing pose a higher risk of cheating which leads them to subject such workers to more negative treatment and deprive them of opportunities. We focus on two ubiquitous ways in which organizations constrain cheating behavior: worker surveillance and task allocation. In Studies 1 and 2, we find that workers with lower financial standing are unfairly subjected to higher levels of surveillance due to higher perceived cheating risk. In Studies 3 and 4, we find that such workers are unfairly discriminated against in terms of being assigned tasks that could potentially have direct or longer term career benefits for them, but that entail a risk of cheating, due to higher perceived cheating risk. Furthermore, supervisors’ preference for complex explanation moderates these effects, such that the negative indirect effect is weaker when preference for complex explanation is higher as opposed to when preference for complex explanation is lower (Studies 2 and 4). These findings extend the understanding of challenges faced by workers with lower financial standing and warn that the attempts to constrain cheating, prevalent in modern organizations, can themselves be systematically biased against vulnerable groups.