Sex, Race, and the Allocation of Credit in Dispersed Teams: Whose Contributions to Team Success Get Noticed and Whose Get Neglected

Abstract

Abstract When the members of a team work together in pursuit of a collective goal, who stands out? We analyze this question by focusing on how managers allocate credit among a team’s members when employee performance is difficult to observe. We argue that under conditions of incomplete information, managers use whatever information they have readily at hand—even if it is only crudely reflective of individual performance—to make inferences about team members’ contributions to team success. We further argue that these inferences will tend to disadvantage women and persons of color relative to white men. Our information-based perspective points to additional propositions that are theoretically novel: Imperfect information will be more severe when a team member works remotely; consequently, team members who are colocated with their manager will be more likely than non-colocated team members to receive recognition for their contributions to team success. Moreover, we argue that any informational disadvantages attaching to remoteness will vary by team members’ race/sex. We use micro-data on 121,809 federal employees who are nested in 31,188 group award instances, and employ a fixed effects approach to test these and related propositions. Our findings’ key implications for theory are that managers allocating credit among a group’s members will tend to do so suboptimally in demographically diverse, geographically dispersed groups. These managers will tend to overlook the contributions of women and persons of color, and will also tend to overlook the contributions of remote team members.