In a randomized-controlled trial, we tested 2 brief interventions designed to mitigate the effects of a "chilly climate" women may experience in engineering, especially in male-dominated fields. ...Participants were students entering a selective university engineering program. The social-belonging intervention aimed to protect students' sense of belonging in engineering by providing a nonthreatening narrative with which to interpret instances of adversity. The affirmation-training intervention aimed to help students manage stress that can arise from social marginalization by incorporating diverse aspects of their self-identity in their daily academic lives. As expected, gender differences and intervention effects were concentrated in male-dominated majors (<20% women). In these majors, compared with control conditions, both interventions raised women's school-reported engineering grade-point-average (GPA) over the full academic year, eliminating gender differences. Both also led women to view daily adversities as more manageable and improved women's academic attitudes. However, the 2 interventions had divergent effects on women's social experiences. The social-belonging intervention helped women integrate into engineering, for instance, increasing friendships with male engineers. Affirmation-training helped women develop external resources, deepening their identification with their gender group. The results highlight how social marginalization contributes to gender inequality in quantitative fields and 2 potential remedies.
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The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) are subject to the Employment Equity Act, which requires federally regulated employers to identify and eliminate barriers to the employment of designated groups ...(women, Indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities (PwD), and racialized members), and establish short-term, numerical goals to address underrepresentation. Addressing employment barriers experienced by these equity seeking groups is one of the CAF's key priorities. The objective of this study is to examine group differences in feelings of inclusion (i.e., relatedness, organizational inclusion, and microaggressions) and retention-related measures (i.e., job satisfaction, affective commitment, and intentions to leave), the contribution of feelings of inclusion to retention measures, and the effect of numerical representation and number of marginalized identities on these concepts. We analyzed data from the 2022 Your Say Matters survey, which was administered to a representative sample of CAF members, with oversampling of under-represented groups. Respondents included 4,483 Regular Force members (30.9% response rate). The groups under study included Indigenous members, persons with disabilities, racialized members, women not part of another group (non-Indigenous, non-racialized, women without disabilities), and everyone else (non-Indigenous, non-racialized, not women, without disabilities). Our hypotheses were supported overall, such that groups with less representation in the CAF scored lower on inclusion measures than groups with more representation. The number of marginalized identities held by military members predicted the inclusion measures, but did not predict retention-related measures. There were some group differences on retention-related measures, such that women not part of another group scored more favorably than other designated groups, and racialized members scored more favorably than PwD and Indigenous members. Inclusion measures predicted job satisfaction, affective commitment, and intentions to leave equally for all groups studied, suggesting that feeling included is important for all.
How powerful is the status quo in determining people's social ideals? The authors propose (a) that people engage in
injunctification
, that is, a motivated tendency to construe the current status quo ...as the most desirable and reasonable state of affairs (i.e., as the most representative of how things should be); (b) that this tendency is driven, at least in part, by people's desire to justify their sociopolitical systems; and (c) that injunctification has profound implications for the maintenance of inequality and societal change. Four studies, across a variety of domains, provided supportive evidence. When the motivation to justify the sociopolitical system was experimentally heightened, participants injunctified extant (a) political power (Study 1), (b) public funding policies (Study 2), and (c) unequal gender demographics in the political and business spheres (Studies 3 and 4, respectively). It was also demonstrated that this motivated phenomenon increased derogation of those who act counter to the status quo (Study 4). Theoretical implications for system justification theory, stereotype formation, affirmative action, and the maintenance of inequality are discussed.
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Military ethics training has tended to focus on imparting ethical attitudes and on improving deliberative moral decision-making through classroom instruction. However, military personnel can be ...exposed to extreme conditions on operations, which can lead to heat-of-the-moment thinking. Under stress, individuals are more likely to engage in automatic processing than deliberative processing, and visceral states such as anger and disgust can increase a person’s risk of behaving unethically. We propose that military ethics training could be improved by reinforcing classroom ethics training with interventions to counteract these risk factors. As training interventions, we recommend incorporating affect-labeling, goal-setting, and perspective-taking into realistic, pre-deployment training to make moral decision-making more robust against stress and other emotional experiences typical in combat. We outline steps researchers and trainers can take to test whether these interventions have the desired impact on ethical behavior.
According to the Competing Values Framework (CVF; Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1983), leadership requires a balance of competing priorities, including achieving goals while supporting subordinates and ...following rules while adapting to changing conditions. When leaders effectively balance these competing demands, they can provide employees with clear roles, a clear reporting structure, and challenging, meaningful work. Among the Canadian Armed Forces, in 2 independent samples, members' perceptions of their leaders (based on the CVF) predicted role stressors (i.e., role ambiguity, role conflict, and role insufficiency), which subsequently predicted morale and military identification. Morale also predicted strong identification and these, in turn, predicted intentions to stay in uniform. The findings provide support for the CVF and show the importance of effective leadership and role stress for employee retention.
Selon le cadre des valeurs en concurrence (CVF; Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1983), le leadership exige un équilibre entre les priorités concurrentes, y compris l'atteinte des objectifs tout en soutenant les subordonnés et le respect des règles tout en s'adaptant aux conditions changeantes. Lorsque les dirigeants équilibrent ces priorités concurrentes de manière efficace, ils peuvent fournir aux employés des rôles clairs, une structure hiérarchique claire et un travail stimulant et significatif. Parmi les Forces armées canadiennes, dans deux échantillons indépendants, la perception des membres de leurs dirigeants (fondée sur le CVF) prédisait des facteurs de stress liés au rôle (p. ex., ambiguïté de rôle, conflit de rôle et insuffisance de rôle), qui ont ensuite prédit le moral et l'identification militaire. Le moral prédisait également une forte identification et ces derniers, à leur tour, prédisaient les intentions de rester en uniforme. Les conclusions soutiennent le CVF et montrent l'importance d'un leadership efficace et du stress lié au rôle pour la rétention des employés.
Public Significance Statement
In two military samples, it was found that when leaders effectively balance competing priorities, employees are more likely to have clear meaningful roles. Employees who have clear, meaningful roles, in turn, are more likely to have high levels of morale, identify with the organization, and intend to stay in the organization.
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System justification theory (SJT) posits that people are motivated to believe that the social system they live in is fair, desirable, and how it should be, especially in contexts that heighten the ...system justification motive. Past researchers have suggested that opposition to feminists may be motivated by the threat that feminism presents to the legitimacy of the status quo, but this hypothesis has not been tested empirically. In this article, we present three studies that directly test the idea that antifeminist backlash can be motivated by system justification. Studies 1 and 2 experimentally manipulated the SJ motive and a female target’s feminist identification (feminist vs. nonfeminist). Study 3 tested the hypothesis by measuring participants’ SJ motivation via an individual difference measure. Participants disagreed more with identical statements about gender issues made by the feminist target than the nonfeminist target, but only when the system justification motive was heightened (Study 2) or chronically high (Study 3).
Ethical leadership encompasses the personal conduct of leaders and leaders’ expectations that followers behave ethically. The two studies presented here draw on moral identity and social identity ...theories to investigate whether moral identity and organizational identification had an indirect effect on the relation between ethical leadership and organizational outcomes. Study 1 examined how ethical leadership and moral identity interact to influence self‐reported ethical behavior using a sample of 3,363 defense personnel. Study 2 examined the mediating role of organizational identification in the relation between ethical leadership and organizational outcomes, such as morale, job satisfaction, and career intentions using a sample of 3,390 military personnel. Consistent with moral identity research, personnel who reported stronger moral identity and who perceived their leaders as higher in ethical leadership were less likely to engage in unethical behavior. Consistent with organizational identification research, higher levels of perceived ethical leadership led to greater organizational identification, which then predicted organizational outcomes (i.e., morale, job satisfaction, and turnover intentions). The findings show the importance of ethical leadership and identity for organizational outcomes.
We propose a new construct (implicit normative evaluations) that purports to measure automatic associations about societal evaluations. We develop a new measure of this construct based on a ...modification of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and describe how it is related to but not redundant with implicit attitudes and explicit normative evaluations. Study 1 provided evidence that implicit normative evaluations and implicit attitudes uniquely predicted evaluations measured by the traditional IAT. Study 2 demonstrated that Asian-Canadian immigrants' implicit normative evaluations toward older people became more negative the longer they were in Canada. Study 3 found that engineering students' (both men and women) implicit normative evaluations toward female engineers became more negative as they were exposed to engineering and that for women these negative normative evaluations predicted their intention to drop out of engineering. Study 4 demonstrated that implicit normative evaluations predicted the speed at which participants decide to “shoot” an African Canadian target on a shooter bias task (Correll, Park, Judd, & Wittenbrink, 2002). Finally, in Study 5, an experimental manipulation of an audience's reaction to racist jokes targeting people from the Middle East affected implicit normative evaluations about this group and that these implicit normative evaluations in turn affected discrimination. The implications of these results for the importance of social influence and culture in shaping thoughts and behavior are discussed.
Past research suggests that members of devalued groups recognize their groups are discriminated against. Do the implicit responses of members of these groups demonstrate the same pattern? We argue ...that they do not and that this is due to a motivated protection of members of devalued groups' social identity. Study 1 demonstrates that, at an explicit level African-Canadians recognize that their group is discriminated against, but at an implicit level African-Canadians think that most people like their group to a greater extent than do European-Canadians. Study 2 replicates this implicit finding with Muslim participants while demonstrating that, when affirmed, this group difference disappears. Study 3 demonstrates that implicit normative regard can predict collective action over and above implicit attitudes and explicit normative regard. The implications for changing the status quo are discussed.
This research program investigates whether representational level of information underlying initial beliefs (individual vs. category) and disconfirming information (individual vs. category) influence ...the magnitude of belief and attitude change regarding categories of objects. In 3 experiments, 2 key effects emerged. A main effect of type of disconfirming information indicated that category-level information produced more belief and attitude change than did individual-level information. Also, a significant interaction between type of information at formation and disconfirmation indicated a relative matching effect, with category-level disconfirmation producing substantially more belief and attitude change than individual-level disconfirmation when initial beliefs were based on category-level information but only slightly greater change when initial beliefs were based on individual-level information.
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