And because the labor market has created more and more superstars in recent decades, as economists have repeatedly found, the number of harassers in that category is probably growing.
“The superstar harassers do cast a long shadow,” Ms. Feldblum said. “If it is well known in a workplace that someone at that level is getting away with bad behavior, that then sends a message down the ranks.”
Partly as a result, the costs of retaining a superstar harasser outweigh the benefits, even in narrow economic terms, according to research cited by the commission.
Social scientists have long documented the ways that power changes people’s psychology. It increases their sense of entitlement — when inequality is high, the affluent have a strong belief that they deserve their money, one recent study suggested — and diminishes their inhibitions.
An experiment published in a psychology journal in 2008 found that men who were given power over women tended to flirt more overtly than men who lacked such power. Another experiment found that those who thought of themselves as powerful underestimated both personal risks, like the chances of developing gum disease, and a more general level of risk, like the number of people who die in plane crashes each year.
“They don’t see threats even if they’re right in front of their face,” Cameron Anderson, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of the second study, said in an interview. Alluding to superstar harassers, Professor Anderson added, “They’re so focused on sexual gratification, they don’t see the moral, ethical and legal problems.”
Many people in an organization, from the most junior scheduler to the chief executive, have some form of power. The distinctive feature of superstars is that they are more likely to use their power with impunity.
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Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard University, said in an interview that although he had seen no reliable data on superstars and sexual harassment per se, evidence showed that organizations tended to tolerate a wide range of misbehavior from people they perceived as stars. “They seem to also get away with things,” he said, “in a way they would never be able to do if they were not viewed as superstars.”
Professor Katz cited a study by two economists in which corporate chief executives who won high-profile awards, typically those conferred by major business publications, subsequently spent more time away from the job on outside pursuits like writing books. They were also more likely to manipulate the earnings that their companies reported.
Such license to misbehave appears to have been common for stars in some of the recent high-profile harassment cases. A former Fox News producer who quit several years ago said that Mr. O’Reilly’s contention that no one had complained about him to the network’s human resources department was basically meaningless because bringing a complaint meant having to be ready to quit.
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(Fox News brought in a new head of human resources this year who was given responsibility for overhauling and expanding the department and who reports directly to the network’s corporate parent.)
In a CNN report, women who worked at ABC News made allegations of inappropriate advances and sexual contact by Mark Halperin, a prominent journalist who was once the division’s political director, but said they feared reporting him to network executives because Mr. Halperin had been a powerful figure there.
Mr. Halperin has denied nonconsensual contact with the women; an ABC News representative said the network considered harassment and retaliation unacceptable and encouraged employees to come forward if they encountered such behavior.
And Susan Fowler, an engineer who quit her job at Uber after contending with what she said were sexism and sexual harassment, wrote a widely read blog post in which she described complaints she filed against two fellow employees that were never acted on. The reason she said she was given for the inaction was that each of the men was a “high performer.”
The irony is that the calculation that persuades employers to ignore bad behavior by stars is frequently wrong, and not just because of the potential damage to an organization’s image if the bad behavior comes to light.
A study by two researchers in 2015 found that the benefit to an employer of retaining a “toxic” employee, such as a sexual harasser, who was in the top 1 percent of productivity was outweighed by the cost of keeping that employee — by a ratio of more than two to one, and probably by far more than that.
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A crucial reason, the study concluded, was that toxic workers tended to drive out other employees, a phenomenon that appeared to have occurred in some recent high-profile cases. Ms. Fowler wrote that when she started working at Uber in November 2015, women made up more than one-quarter of her department. Within 13 months, according to her blog post, the share had fallen below 6 percent, with sexism being a major factor.
At Fox News, a prime-time star, Megyn Kelly, left in what was reported to be disillusionment over an atmosphere in which the mistreatment of women — including the behavior of Mr. O’Reilly — was tolerated.
(The study on the costs of retaining toxic employees relied on data encompassing thousands of customer-support and other front-line service workers, but the evidence suggested that a similar result would apply in many higher-stakes industries, one of the authors, Dylan Minor of Northwestern University, said in an interview.)
The growth of a superstar economy is reflected in a greater concentration of money and power among those at the top. A generation or two ago, a top worker who was slightly better than his or her peers tended to receive a moderate premium in earnings. Today, with companies operating on a more sweeping scale, that premium is much higher. Top performers only slightly better than their peers tend to make vastly more money.
“It’s really taken off in the last two decades,” Professor Katz of Harvard said. “You see it in broad measures of income, and even in the raw data — the hedge fund manager, finance people, C.E.O. data, top academics, top lawyers.”
In effect, the rest of the economy is becoming more like Hollywood, where a small group of stars have long reaped a huge portion of the rewards. That means more bosses and boards may soon face decisions about whether to stand up to harassers or to overlook their behavior.
“To the extent that technology gives you the power to serve a broader swath of the market, and you’ve got more leverage as a result,” said Robert H. Frank, a Cornell University economist who has written extensively about superstars, “that’s not slowed down one iota.”
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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/business/superstars-sexual-harassment.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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