Working Together: Status Effects of Racial and Gender Identity on Teammate Selection

Abstract

Research reported in this article examines the impact of race and gender as status characteristics on the selection of teammates for a collectively oriented task. Expectation states research provides the theoretical grounding for the project and for hypotheses tested with choice models. Results suggest that expectation states/status characteristics theory may not apply to the task of teammate selection. We find that race and gender have different effects on the choices made by respondents; race does not function as a status characteristic but, rather, as an identity characteristic in which the ingroup is favored; and respondents, regardless of their own racial identity and gender identity, exhibit a strong bias toward women as teammates.