The race discipline gap: A cautionary note on archival measures of behavioral misconduct

Abstract

Research on employee misconduct has increasingly adopted behavioral measures in field settings, such as archival organizational records, to circumvent potential issues of external validity and social desirability associated with laboratory experiments and self-reported surveys. However, similar to the issues facing the criminal justice and education systems, where racial disparities in punishment are well-documented, organizations face a difficult challenge in detecting and enforcing misconduct. Even when organizations adopt seemingly objective policies for addressing misconduct, it is still possible for certain groups to be disproportionately accused of misconduct and/or disciplined. Drawing from social psychological theories of social identity and aversive racism, we examined the extent to which Black employees (in contrast to White employees) are more likely to have formal incidences of misconduct documented in their employment records, even when there are no racial differences in the number of allegations of misconduct. Across three datasets collected from the police departments of three major metropolitan areas (Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia), we identified the presence of a race discipline gap in archival organizational records of behavioral misconduct. We discuss the implications of these findings and highlight the need for caution when researchers and practitioners use archival measures of behavioral misconduct.