Best for Whom? Social Stratification and Employee Outcomes in Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For

• In Event: 389 - Regular Session. Workplace Diversity

Abstract

Popular claims that a workplace is good for its employees may overlook gender, ethnoracial, and class variation in employee reactions and experiences. This paper analyzes variation in employee perceptions of organizations that have been promoted as best places to work. Our empirical analysis is based on a unique dataset of all firms that applied to be one of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For (BCTWF) between 2006 and 2011, and includes over 600,000 employees in 1,052 companies. The dataset contains extensive measures of employee workplace perceptions, including trust in and credibility of management, involvement in decision-making, information-sharing, and organizational justice. Inclusion on the BCTWF list appears to reflect the components of high performance work systems: participation in management, broad training, and financial incentives for performance (including profit-sharing and employee ownership). Our analysis focuses on the effects of gender, race/ethnicity, and occupational level on perceptions of trust, empowerment, and justice, and whether working for a BCTWF firm or for a firm with employee ownership results in different perceptions. Our findings reveal that 1) BCTWF firm employees from historically marginalized groups (white women, nonwhite men and women, and working-class employees) perceive their firms as more just than similar employees of non-BCTWF firms; 2) hourly workers react most positively to BCTWF firms; and 3) employee ownership has mixed effects on employees from marginalized groups.

Authors

• Ed Carberry, University of Massachusetts-Boston

• Joan S.M. Meyers, University of the Pacific