The Unfulfilled Promise of Meritocracy in Organizations

Research Seminar

Management & Human Resources

Speaker: Emilio J. Castilla  

MIT Sloan School of Management

Bernard Ramanantsoa room

What biases and obstacles get in the way when organizations seek to attract, retain, and reward the best-performing employees? Given the widely popular goals of promoting meritocracy and creating opportunities inside organizations, I have for the past decade conducted research across multiple organizations to investigate the role that merit, performance evaluations, and other talent-management practices play in shaping employees’ careers in today’s workplaces. I have found evidence of variation in how leaders and managers define merit and consequently make merit-based employment decisions, depending on the organizational context they work in as well as the characteristics of the individuals they screen and evaluate. In fact, I have shown that meritocratic goals, under certain organizational circumstances, can introduce biases in favor of white men compared to women and racial minorities. In my presentation, I will discuss the key findings of some of my projects on achieving true meritocracy and excellence in organizations. In so doing, I will highlight the practical insights of my research into the areas of employment, organizations, and workplace inequality—a topic that is the focus of a new book I am writing.