Why is it that increasing the number of women in an occupation through equal opportunity mechanisms causes potential beneficiaries of affirmative action to become less interested in the occupation? To account for that finding, it was hypothesized that not only the outcome of a selection process but the perceived fairness of the selection procedure affects the inferences beneficiaries make about an organization. Inferences of dispositions toward fairness in particular were expected to have a major influence on attraction to an organization. In response to a description of a situation in which they benefited from affirmative action selection, and in which selectee qualifications, the organization's history of discrimination, and the type of affirmative action procedure were manipulated, participants made inferences about an organization. The manipulations of qualifications and affirmative action procedure influenced perceived fairness of the procedure, dispositional inferences, and attraction to the organization. Moreover, dispositional inferences influenced attraction to the organization most. These findings underscore the need to study outcome-based and procedure-based social inferences for theoretical and practical concerns. These results also indicate that organizations should evaluate carefully the (actual and perceived) procedural aspects of their affirmative action policy.The research literature on the psychology of affirmative action is filled with paradoxes. Among them is the finding that when, in attempting to increase the number of women in an occupation, women are given "preferential treatment" in the process of selection, members of the target group who observe this become less interested in the occupational group (Heilman & Herlihy, 1984). This is paradoxical because intuitively we would expect that members of a group benefited by an agency should be more, not less, attracted to that Requests for reprints should be sent to Rupert W. Nacoste,

Although it has been recognized that a large number of issues linked to the social policy of affirmative action are of a social psychological nature, research investigating such issues has not considered the social psychological importance of implementation procedures. Social policy analysts have differentiated implementation procedures on the degree to which they include relevant achievement criteria.In the present research this differentiation is couched within the theoretical framework of procedural justice and is utilized to critique the work of Austin et al. (1977). These researchers investigated the responses of individuals favorably treated in an affirmative action like situation and conclude that affirmative action is evaluated as "absolutely" unfair by these individuals. Based on the critique, a 2 (qualifications) • 2 (history of discrimination) • 2 (procedure) role play experiment was conducted. The results of the experiment unambiguously support the hypothesis that implementation procedure will greatly affect a variety of individual responses such as general affect, evaluations of procedural fairness, evaluations of outcome fairness, and evaluations of a relevant subunit of the involved institution. * This article is based in part on a dissertation submitted to the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. Special thanks are extended to the members of the dissertation committee, Drs.

Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is assessed by measuring how frequently employees display extra‐role and discretionary behaviors. One hundred forty‐four managerial employees responded to an OCB scale and indicated the number of behaviors on the scale they believed to be formally evaluated. None of the behaviors were believed to be unevaluated by all employees. Data suggest that a typical OCB scale is not measuring citizenship behaviors for everybody, and that OCB measurement needs refinement. Best prediction of other organizational variables was obtained when both the OCB and an index of “unevaluated” behaviors were used as predictors. Supervisor fairness interacted with OCB when predicting organizational commitment, and this interaction was contingent on the extent OCBs were believed to be unevaluated.

A review of the literature pertaining to Rokeach, Smith, and Evans' (1960)

Using Robinson and Insko's attributed difference manipulation of belief dissimilarity, data were collected from the same junior high school that Robinson and Insko had studied 13 years previously. The school is located in a small North Carolina community. Both the old and the new studies included manipulations of race of other and belief dissimilarity. As predicted, the race effect for the new subjects is significantly smaller than for the old subjects. This result was obtained for all dependent variables, including one relating to marriage. For both old and new subjects, belief effects were stronger than race effects for semantic differential items relating to abstract evaluation. Data collected from black subjects in the new sample indicated the lack of a race effect on the marriage assessmenta result that provides evidence against the hypothesis that large race effects occur when there is intimacy of contact. Further, an assessment of social pressure was correlated with the race effect, whereas as assessment of perceived intimacy was not.