MERIT Lab · Research
MERIT Lab specializes in the science of who gets ahead.
Assessment tools don't just measure talent. They define it. This work examines how selection instruments, performance criteria, and evaluation rubrics are designed, validated, and institutionalized, with particular attention to whose definitions of competence, potential, and merit get encoded into these systems and whose get left out.
We are interested in how organizations construct the appearance of objectivity, how assessment systems achieve legitimacy independent of their predictive validity, and how small decisions in instrument design accumulate into large-scale patterns of inclusion and exclusion.
"How do dominant narratives about competence get operationalized into formal assessment criteria?"
"What makes a flawed assessment system feel credible (and to whom)?"
"How do evaluation rubrics encode status expectations under the guise of merit?"
Who gets seen as high-potential? Who gets sponsored, developed, and tracked into leadership? This body of work investigates how organizations identify, cultivate, and credential talent and how those processes systematically reproduce the demographic and cultural composition of existing leadership rather than expanding it.
We examine the formal mechanisms (nomination systems, stretch assignments, development programs) and informal dynamics (visibility, advocacy, social capital) through which some people get accelerated and others get stalled, often without either group fully understanding why.
"What cues do decision-makers use when identifying 'leadership potential', and where do those cues come from?"
"How do developmental opportunities compound advantage for those who already have it?"
"What role does relational proximity to power play in who gets developed?"
Systems don't operate in a vacuum. They are enacted by people in relationships, shaped by status hierarchies, identity dynamics, and interpersonal power. This research examines the relational mechanisms through which organizational inequity is reproduced at the individual and dyadic level, even in organizations formally committed to equity.
We are particularly interested in how identity-based expectations shape the evaluation of performance and potential, how relationships serve as conduits for opportunity (or its absence), and how individuals navigate organizations whose formal and informal rules are often in tension.
"How do status characteristics shape whose contributions get noticed, credited, and rewarded?"
"How do people manage identity threat in contexts where who they are affects what they're assumed to be capable of?"
"What does resistance look like from within systems that are difficult to name?"