Spring Seminar Series: Emilio J. Castilla (MIT)

"The Unfulfilled Promise of Meritocracy in Organizations" What biases and obstacles get in the way when companies seek to attract, retain, and reward the best-performing employees? Given the widely popular goals of promoting meritocracy and creating opportunities inside organizations, I have for the past decade conducted research across multiple organizations to investigate the role that merit, performance evaluations, and other talent-management practices play in shaping employees’ careers in today’s workplaces. I have found evidence of variation in how leaders and managers define merit and consequently make merit-based employment decisions, depending on the organizational context they work in as well as the characteristics of the individuals they screen and evaluate. In fact, I have shown that meritocratic goals, under certain organizational circumstances, can introduce biases in favor of white men compared to women and racial minorities. In my presentation, I will discuss the key findings of some of my projects on achieving true meritocracy and excellence in organizations. In so doing, I will highlight the practical insights of my research into the areas of employment, organizations, and workplace inequality—a topic that is the focus of a new book I am writing. Bio: Emilio J. Castilla is the NTU professor of Management and a professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is currently the co-director of the Institute for Work and Employment Research. Castilla joined MIT in 2005, after being a faculty member in the Management Department at the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania. He is also a faculty member of the Work and Organization Studies Group at MIT, and a research Fellow at the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School. He received his PhD in Sociology from Stanford University. His work has appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, Organization Science, ILR Review, American Journal of Sociology, and American Sociological Review, among many. He is currently Division Chair for the Organization and Management Theory of the Academy of Management.