The paradox of meritocracy: System justification and inequality in federal agencies (Record no. 531943)
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| fixed length control field | 01738nam a22001457a 4500 |
| 008 - FIXED-LENGTH DATA ELEMENTS--GENERAL INFORMATION | |
| fixed length control field | 251112b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d |
| 100 ## - MAIN ENTRY--PERSONAL NAME | |
| Personal name | Marvel , John D. |
| 245 ## - TITLE STATEMENT | |
| Title | The paradox of meritocracy: System justification and inequality in federal agencies |
| 260 ## - PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC. (IMPRINT) | |
| Place of publication, distribution, etc | The American Review Public Administration |
| 300 ## - PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION | |
| Extent | 55(5), Jul, 2025: p.415-437 |
| 520 ## - SUMMARY, ETC. | |
| Summary, etc | Within public administration, concerns about performance pay’s effectiveness have tended to focus on how institutional constraints and public sector employees’ unique dispositional qualities limit the potential efficacy of monetary incentives. We suggest that an important, previously overlooked pitfall of public sector performance pay is that it can generate a “paradox of meritocracy” by interacting with results-based organizational cultures in such a way that it produces race- and sex-based inequality. Contra popular notions that meritocratic systems reward individuals exclusively for their performance, we contend that meritocratic systems can instead exacerbate inequality. The mechanism that underlies this “paradox of meritocracy” is system justification—a social psychological phenomenon in which a social system’s participants are predisposed to justify and accept between-person differences in status and its material entailments as legitimate. We combine micro-level federal personnel data on merit pay awards with survey-based measures of agency culture to test our argument.-Reproduced https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02750740251340069 |
| 650 ## - SUBJECT ADDED ENTRY--TOPICAL TERM | |
| Topical term or geographic name as entry element | Meritocracy, Inequality, Culture, Performance pay, New public management. |
| 9 (RLIN) | 57836 |
| 773 ## - HOST ITEM ENTRY | |
| Main entry heading | The American Review Public Administration |
| 942 ## - ADDED ENTRY ELEMENTS (KOHA) | |
| Item type | Articles |
| Withdrawn status | Lost status | Source of classification or shelving scheme | Damaged status | Not for loan | Permanent location | Current location | Date acquired | Serial Enumeration / chronology | Barcode | Date last seen | Koha item type |
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| Indian Institute of Public Administration | Indian Institute of Public Administration | 2025-11-12 | 55(5), Jul, 2025: p.415-437 | AR137582 | 2025-11-12 | Articles |