Maybe too little but not too late: four challenges for employment discrimination research in I–O

Abstract

In their focal article ‘Gone fishing’, Ruggs et al. (2013) suggest that members of marginalized groups, such as ethnic/racial minorities other than Blacks, receive too little attention in top-tier Industrial and Organizational (I-O) psychology journals. While we acknowledge the particularities each stigmatized group must face in the workplace and society, our commentary pleads for a better understanding of (1) general, underlying processes of discrimination across stigmatized groups while taking (2) complexity of discrimination into consideration. Whereas we concur with the authors regarding the need for more research, relevant studies on employment discrimination -- even on the marginalized groups mentioned in the focal article – have been published, albeit many of them outside the focal I-O psychology journals mentioned and even outside the I-O psychology field. We believe that employment discrimination research might further benefit from (3) triangulation and (4) cross-cultural validation to advance insights, two other aspects that the focal article only slightly touched upon. We will illustrate these four challenges for future research on employment discrimination in I-O psychology with findings on hiring discrimination of Arab ethnics, one of the marginalized groups in the focal article, and one to which we have devoted considerable research effort