AFFIRMATIVE-ACTION AND THE BEHAVIOR OF DECISION-MAKERS

Rosen and Mericle (1979) claimed to have demonstrated that the simple strength of an organization's affirmative-action policy statement can cause decision makers to engage in behaviors that subvert the goals of the policy. We questioned the conceptual and empirical validity of th eir claim, pointing out the absence of any attention to issues of deci sion makers' understanding and evaluations of the procedures of affirm ative action. Based on a procedural-justice approach, we replicated an d extended the Rosen and Mericle study by including measures of respon dents' preexisting conceptions and evaluations of the procedural featu res of affirmative action. That replication showed that decision maker s' understanding and evaluations of procedures, as represented by a se t of procedural-justice variables, provide a more complete description of the influence of affirmative action on the behavior of decision ma kers.