The Informal Mechanisms of Formal Performance Evaluation in a Racialized and Gendered Tech Organization

• In Event: 20455 - Gender and Racial Inequality in Organizations

Abstract

Employees learn about their work performance not only from their formal evaluations, but also from their informal interactions with managers and colleagues. Despite efforts to formalize organizational work processes, race and gender inequality persist in outcomes. We explore the processes outside the formal review and argue that performance evaluation takes place and is experienced outside the formal review process. These outside processes guide how employees understand their work performance. Preliminary findings indicate evaluative bias is a background process influencing the formal performance review and this bias trickles down into how employees receive informal feedback and interact with others. These informal processes also trickle back up to influence the formal review. Three processes work to justify and mediate how employees receive this work performance feedback. These processes are the relevancy of the evaluation criteria used, the level of ambiguity in feedback delivery, and the discretion managers use in helping employees gain upward mobility. Using in-depth interviews with 24 women tech workers with employment experience at a large high-tech company, our preliminary findings suggest these processes are racialized and gendered, with Black and Asian American women experiencing more justifications of their stalled upward mobility via the use of irrelevant criteria, ambiguous feedback, and less managerial discretion in their favor. As a result, these women feel they are evaluated unfairly, and this leads some of them to consider leaving the organization or opting out of organizational processes that could lead to upward mobility.

Authors

• MaryTherese Escueta, University of Delaware

• Shawna Bowden Vican, University of Delaware