To Know or Not to Know: Employees’ Policy Knowledge and Their Perception of Discrimination

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 30: Diversity and Discrimination Policies

Abstract

Perceived workplace discrimination carries well-documented consequences for employees and organizations alike. Yet organizations invest heavily in hiring policies designed to formalize procedures and promote diversity, operating on the implicit assumption that employees are aware these policies exist. Drawing on signaling theory, such policies communicate organizational commitments to fairness and inclusion, but only if employees receive the signal. This study therefore rests on two pillars: mapping which employees know whether their organization has anti-discrimination hiring policies in place, and examining whether that policy knowledge shapes how discriminatory employees perceive their workplace to be. While individual-level factors such as gender and ethnicity are known to influence discrimination perceptions, little attention has been paid to organizational factors.
Drawing on original survey data from 2,968 employees in the Netherlands, I apply latent class analysis to identify four distinct profiles of policy knowledge. 12% of respondents demonstrate high knowledge and report that policies are present; 46% demonstrate high knowledge but report policies are absent; 26% are largely unaware of their organization's hiring practices; and 13% hold mixed or partial awareness. Multinomial logit models reveal that policy knowledge is structured by organizational role, education, and firm-level characteristics, but notably not by gender or migration background, suggesting that members of groups vulnerable to discrimination are not especially likely to seek out protective policy information. OLS regression models show that perceived ethnic and gender discrimination is lowest among employees who report policy absence and highest among those who report policy presence. This pattern is consistent with the idea that awareness of diversity efforts raises consciousness of the very inequalities those policies shall address.
This study contributes by introducing policy knowledge as a dimension of organizational research and showing that such knowledge is unevenly distributed. It also extends signaling theory by demonstrating that policy presence does not signal fairness.

Author

• Katharina Elisabeth Stückradt, European University Institute