Managers Confirm Stereotypes

The purpose of this paper is to check the robustness of the results Dur, Kamphorst and Swank found in ‘Don’t Demotivate: Discriminate!’. In their paper they consider confidence management with a promotion model. The manager has to promote one of the two employees based on their abilities. They found that it is optimal for the manager to discriminate when employees anticipate one employee to be favored. I check the robustness by adjusting the ability distributions of the employees, making the distributions non continuous. First of all, in this paper it is never optimal for the manager to promote an employee with a lower ability, while Dur, Kamphorst and Swank found the opposite. Second, the nature of discrimination differs. They found that the manager confirms the beliefs the employees have about the preferences of the manager. The results of this paper show that the manager confirms the beliefs the employees have about their own ability distributions. In other words, the manager confirms stereotypes. When employees expect their ability distributions to be equal, it can be optimal for the manager to use a nondiscriminatory promotion strategy