Reconsidering the Black-White Disparity in Federal Performance Ratings

The Office of Personnel Management and Merit Systems Protection Board attribute race disparities in federal employee performance ratings to rater bias. Those claims ignore research findings, particularly meta-analyses, consistently showing Black workers exhibiting worse absenteeism and other Organizational Delinquency Behaviors (ODB). Research also consistently shows Blacks scoring lower than others on objective measures of job knowledge, work quantity and quality, and on work-sample tests. Research on rater race effects does not support claims that White supervisors rate Whites higher and Black supervisors rate Blacks higher. Generally, all raters rate Whites higher and Blacks lower, as predicted by the data on objective performance and ODB. Consistently, the Black-White ratings gap is narrower when raters' subjective ratings substitute for, or are combined with, objective performance measures. Finally, the paper proposes a practical stepwise approach for applying recent research findings to allegations of rater racial bias in federal and other public agencies.