Overt and Covert Discrimination in Organizations
Chapter from the book: Köse, S. & Özkan, O. S. (eds.) 2025. The Dark Side of Organizational Behavior.

Başak Berberoğlugil

Synopsis

Discrimination is defined as the disadvantageous treatment of individuals due to their group affiliation and occurs in the labor market based on factors such as gender, ethnicity, age, religion, and sexual orientation (Doğrul, 2007; Goldman et al., 2006). Becker (1957) emphasizes that discrimination is an irrational choice that leads to economic inefficiency. Overt discrimination manifests itself through practices such as direct exclusion, unequal pay, or quota hiring. Although legal regulations (Civil Rights Act of 1964) have reduced this type of discrimination, they have not completely eliminated it (Colarelli et al., 2010). On the other hand, covert discrimination is masked with neutral justifications such as "cultural incompatibility." Moral licensing (Monin & Miller, 2001) and prejudices based on customer preferences (Leonard et al., 2010) feed this type of discrimination. There are many types of discrimination such as gender discrimination, ethnic origin discrimination, age discrimination, religious belief discrimination. Transparent recruitment criteria such as anonymous applications and objective criteria can be applied against discrimination in organizations (Wood et al., 2009), unconscious bias training can be used (Lennartz et al., 2017), and inclusive policies such as diversity management and intersectionality perspective (Shields, 2008) can be adopted. Legal regulations alone are insufficient in combating discrimination; transformation of organizational culture and systematic monitoring mechanisms are necessary.

How to cite this book

Berberoğlugil, B. (2025). Overt and Covert Discrimination in Organizations. In: Köse, S. & Özkan, O. S. (eds.), The Dark Side of Organizational Behavior. Özgür Publications. DOI: https://doi.org/10.58830/ozgur.pub816.c3440

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Published

July 25, 2025

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