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UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF LABOR

Mandating change: The impact of court-ordered policy changes on managerial diversity (Hirsh & Cha, 2017)

Review Guidelines

Causal Evidence Guidelines

Absence of conflict of interest.

Citation

Hirsh, E., & Cha, Y. (2017). Mandating change: The impact of court-ordered policy changes on managerial diversity. ILR Review, 70(1), 42–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793916668880 [Court-Ordered Employee Performance Reviews]

Highlights

  • The study’s objective was to examine the impact of court-ordered use of employee performance reviews and progress reports on the representation of white women, black men, and black women employed in managerial positions. The authors investigated similar research questions for other interventions, the profiles of which can be found here:

  • The study used a nonexperimental design to estimate the impact of court-ordered use of employee performance reviews and progress reports on the representation of white women, black women, and black men in managerial positions one year after the court settlement or verdict. Study authors also used data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and a database on the settlements and verdicts of major employment discrimination lawsuits to analyze the impact of court-ordered use of employee performance reviews and progress reports on changes in sex and race composition of managerial positions. 

  • The study found a significant relationship between court-ordered use of employee performance reviews and progress reports and higher odds of white women and black women being represented in managerial positions. 

  • This study receives a low causal evidence rating. This means we are not confident that the estimated effects are attributable to court-ordered use of employee performance reviews and progress reports; other factors are likely to have contributed. 

Intervention Examined

Court-Ordered Employee Performance Reviews

Features of the Study

Although the authors did not provide details for each individual case that legally required the use of employee performance reviews, these policies were summarized as concrete policies to build diversity efforts into the organizational structure of the establishments. Specifically, employee performance reviews and progress reports intend to include objective criteria and data rather than relying on subjective and thus potentially biased criteria when making promotion and job assignment decisions.  

The study used a nonexperimental design to estimate the impact of court-ordered use of employee performance reviews on the representation of white women, black women, and black men employed in managerial positions. Study authors used data from high-profile employment discrimination lawsuits settled from 1996 through 2008 that required the firm to implement use of employee performance reviews in the court settlements or verdicts for each subsidiary establishment. The authors measured managerial diversity one year following the lawsuit settlement or verdict. In addition to controlling for unobservable characteristics, the statistical model controlled for several lawsuit and organizational characteristics such as monetary awards for plaintiffs, the number of plaintiffs and lawsuits that each firm faced, establishment size, firm size, the percent of white male managers, within-establishment labor supply and local labor market, and the year.  

Findings

Employment 

  • The study found that legally required employee performance reviews were significantly related to higher odds of representation of white women and black women in manager positions. No significant relationship was found for black men. 

Considerations for Interpreting the Findings

Given that high profile lawsuits and their resulting court-mandated policy requirements were public information, it is likely that employees within the sampled establishments anticipated the use of employee performance reviews. Additionally, the data sources used did not provide information on previous policies/outcome data of the establishments required to implement use of employee performance reviews prior to the court settlements or verdicts. Because of this, the authors were not able to appropriately control for the anticipation and associated affected behavior prior to the intervention. 

Causal Evidence Rating

The quality of causal evidence presented in this report is low because the authors did not account for trends in outcomes prior to the participant’s anticipation of the court-mandated use of employee performance reviews. This means we are not confident that the estimated effects are attributable to court-mandated use of employee performance reviews; other factors are likely to have contributed. 

Reviewed by CLEAR

January 2023

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