Emilio J. Castilla, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stephen Benard, Indiana University published “The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations,” in the December 2010 issue of Administrative Science Quarterly. This article won the 2010 Academy of Management’s Best Paper Award in Organizational Behavior.

“In this article, we develop and empirically test the theoretical
argument that when an organizational culture promotes meritocracy
(compared with when it does not), managers in that organization may
ironically show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing
women in translating employee performance evaluations into rewards and
other key career outcomes; we call this the ‘paradox of meritocracy.’”

This article was also highlighted on orgtheory.net. To see their post, please click here.