When a Star Shines Too Bright: The Impact of a High-Status Minority Member on Pursuing Diversity Goals

The current research examines a potential implication of having a high-status minority member in organizations—a “star” athlete, professor, or lawyer. Building on the literature on organizational diversity, individual status, and licensing effects, we suggest that having a minority member with high status can license organizational decision makers to reduce their effort in increasing diversity compared with having a minority member with relatively low status. We analyzed the hiring outcomes of Major League Baseball teams from 1988 to 2019 and found that the teams with a higher-status minority player hired fewer minority players in the next draft compared with the teams with a lower-status minority player. This effect was moderated by role prototypicality and group membership—the attributes that would further increase the saliency of a high-status minority player. We then corroborated these findings in a laboratory experiment showing that participants were less willing to invest effort in hiring minority candidates when a company already had a high-status (versus low-status) minority member. These findings extend existing literature by demonstrating when and how the presence of a prominent minority member might inadvertently diminish organizational efforts to increase diversity.

Funding: The studies were funded by New York University.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.15155.