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  • June 2020
  • Article
  • Management Science

The Isolated Choice Effect and Its Implications for Gender Diversity in Organizations

By: Edward H. Chang, Erika L. Kirgios, Aneesh Rai and Katherine L. Milkman
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Abstract

We highlight a feature of personnel selection decisions that can influence the gender diversity of groups and teams. Specifically, we show that people are less likely to choose candidates whose gender would increase group diversity when making personnel selections in isolation (i.e., when they are responsible for selecting a single group member) than when making collections of choices (i.e., when they are responsible for selecting multiple group members). We call this the isolated choice effect. Across six preregistered experiments (n = 3,509), we demonstrate that the isolated choice effect has important consequences for group diversity. When making sets of hiring and selection decisions (as opposed to making a single hire), people construct more gender-diverse groups. Mediation and moderation studies suggest that people do not attend as much to diversity when making isolated selection choices, which drives this effect.

Keywords

Behavior And Behavioral Decision Making; Organizational Studies; Decision Analysis; Economics; Decision Making; Behavior; Analysis; Organizations; Diversity; Gender

Citation

Chang, Edward H., Erika L. Kirgios, Aneesh Rai, and Katherine L. Milkman. "The Isolated Choice Effect and Its Implications for Gender Diversity in Organizations." Management Science 66, no. 6 (June 2020): 2752–2761.
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About The Author

Edward H. Chang

Negotiation, Organizations & Markets
→More Publications

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More from the Authors
  • To Drive Efforts...Don't Tiptoe Around Your Legal Risk By: Edward Chang and Bonnie Levine
  • When Seeking Help, Women and Racial/Ethnic Minorities Benefit from Explicitly Stating Their Identity By: Erika L. Kirgios, Aneesh Rai, Edward H. Chang and Katherine L. Milkman
  • A 680,000-Person Megastudy of Nudges to Encourage Vaccination in Pharmacies By: Katherine L. Milkman, Linnea Gandhi, Mitesh S. Patel, Heather N. Graci, Dena M. Gromet, Hung Ho, Joseph S. Kay, Timothy W. Lee, Jake Rothschild, Jonathan E. Bogard, Ilana Brody, Christopher F. Chabris, Edward Chang, Gretchen B. Chapman, Jennifer E. Dannals, Noah J. Goldstein, Amir Goren, Hal Hershfield, Alex Hirsch, Jillian Hmurovic, Samantha Horn, Dean Karlan, Ariella S. Kristal, Cait Lamberton, Michael N. Meyer, Allison H. Oakes, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Maheen Shermohammed, Jaochim H. Talloen, Caleb Warren, Ashley Whillans, Kuldeep N. Yadav, Julian J. Zlatev, Ron Berman, Chalanda N. Evans, Rahul Ladhania, Jens Ludwig, Nina Mazar, Sendhil Mullainathan, Christopher K. Snider, Jann Spiess, Eli Tsukayama, Lyle Ungar, Christophe Van den Bulte, Kevin G. Volpp and Angela L. Duckworth
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