How Promotion and Salary Decisions are Influenced by Evaluator Gender and Human Resource Status

Abstract

Many scholars have explored the relationship between employee performance and promotion, concentrating on the employee’s knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to successfully climb the career ladder. Less attention has been given to how managers likely recommend promotion components – upward mobility and pay raise – differently given the context of the industry they are in and their own characteristics. Drawing on social exchange theory, we investigate how evaluator characteristics including gender and human resource manager status interact to shape the relationship between performance and promotion decisions. Through a policy capturing design, recommendations from 93 line and human resource managers are collected for 23 different scenarios that range in contextual and task performance along with job type and applicant gender. Results show that human resource manager status of evaluators leads to a stronger relationship between task performance and pay raise recommendations compared to line manager evaluators and a weaker relationship between contextual performance and upward mobility recommendations compared to line manager evaluators. We find that these relationships are stronger when the human resource managers are men. We discuss implications of these findings for understanding the role of promotion decision-makers in and the performance indicators used to make those decisions.