(Illustration by Adam McCauley)
When for-profit firms sponsor social impact initiatives and seek employee participation, what effects might such participation have on their employees’ career trajectories? Does it help them learn skills and build their résumés to gain promotions?
As it turns out, such participation can hamper advancement, especially if the staffer and the manager evaluating promotion are both male, a new paper finds. Despite the firm’s stated intentions, managers may think that employees who choose to volunteer are less committed and less of a fit with the firm’s culture, the researchers found. And this concern is realized when it’s a man who is seeking a promotion and has a man evaluating him.
Christiane Bode, assistant professor of strategy at Imperial College Business School, published the paper with her colleague Michelle Rogan, associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship, and Jasjit Singh, professor of strategy at INSEAD.
“Because social impact work is more congruent with female than male gender role stereotypes, promotion rates will be lower for participating men, and male evaluators will be less likely than female evaluators to recommend promotion for male participants,” they write. Men associated with the firm’s pro bono projects are promoted at lower rates than women with the same experience, as well as both men and women staffers who didn’t volunteer.
The researchers conducted two studies. They reviewed the records of 1,379 workers at a consulting firm and also shared a hypothetical vignette with 893 managers to see whether they would choose to approve or deny an employee’s promotion. They provided the managers a brief on a fictional employee who either chose to work on the firm’s social impact initiatives or not, with either a male or female name and pronoun as the only differences in the résumés.
The managers felt that the volunteers were less committed to their jobs and the firm, and they also thought the applicants didn’t exhibit cultural fit, interviews revealed. This dampening effect was most pronounced when men were ruling on the promotion cases of male employees.
Many companies struggle to balance a commitment to shareholder-focused capitalism with today’s increasingly prevalent prosocial corporate values, which many customers and, crucially, employees expect. Having the opportunity to volunteer, on company time, for charitable causes is now a standard perk of both large corporations’ and start-ups’ recruiting and retention strategies. Employees also assume that if the cause for which they’re working is an official corporate project, it will reflect positively on their records—and in many cases, volunteering for firmwide initiatives is an explicit part of promotion rubrics.
“The negative effect of participation on promotion is conditional upon participant and evaluator gender, underscoring the role of gender in evaluation of social impact work,” the researchers write. “In settings in which decision makers are predominantly male, gender beliefs may limit male employees’ latitude to contribute to the firm’s social impact agenda.”
The most surprising result was the strong connection between the evaluators’ gender and how they viewed the fictional employees’ volunteer work, Bode says. It’s a rare instance where gender stereotypes negatively hurt men’s careers, an effect that women are more likely to experience in the workplace.
“We had proposed that indeed men who had engaged in socially impactful work would be less likely to be promoted and that this pattern should be more pronounced when men were evaluated by male evaluators,” she says. “However, in the end we found that the negative promotion effect was entirely driven by men.”
As companies get more involved with corporate social responsibility work, executives will have to figure out how their managers’ own gender biases can be neutralized if they’re getting in the way of the firm’s goals.
“Firms with employee-based CSR [corporate social responsibility] programs need to consider that these are embedded in a larger social structure with norms, beliefs, and biases that can sometimes work against the firm’s intentions, as well intended as they may be,” Bode says.
Because executives are more likely to be men in the corporate world, the research may speak to how firms have to change before social impact projects will truly be integrated into company culture.
“The most important contribution of this paper is to show how gender stereotypes influence how social-impact-oriented work is rewarded and punished within organizations,” says Matthew Lee, an assistant professor at the NYU Stern School of Business. “It is accepted that women tend to occupy more prosocial roles and are relatively more rewarded for doing so, but a striking finding here is that men who participate in these initiatives are actually punished, especially when evaluated by other men.”
If men see their careers penalized, they may shy away from work-related volunteering.
“In showing that expectations about this differ by gender, this research raises the important question of how our gendered culture might be preventing some of our best talent from working on our most pressing social problems,” Lee says.
Christiane Bode, Michelle Rogan, and Jasjit Singh, “Up to No Good? Gender, Social Impact Work, and Employee Promotions,” Administrative Science Quarterly, forthcoming.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.