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Maybe Too Little But Not Too Late: Four Challenges for Employment Discrimination Research in I–O

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2015

Eva Derous ,
Alexander Buijsrogge  and
Ann Marie Ryan
Eva Derous*
Affiliation:
Ghent University
Alexander Buijsrogge
Affiliation:
Ghent University
Ann Marie Ryan
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
*
E-mail: eva.derous@ugent.be, Address: Department of Personnel Management, Work and Organizational Psychology, Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
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Extract

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. Although we acknowledge the particularities each stigmatized group must face in the workplace and society, our commentary pleads for a better understanding of (a) general, underlying processes of discrimination across stigmatized groups while taking (b) 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 (c) triangulation and (d) 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.

Type
Commentaries
Information
Industrial and Organizational Psychology , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 75 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2013 

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