Ethnic Matching of Supervisors to Subordinate Work Groups

Research on minority authority attainment tends to stress top-down processes ofsocial closure, whereby the dominant social group produces and preserves positions of power and influence by excluding out-group members. We argue that his view, while helpful, is incomplete. R turning to Weber 's original conceptualization of social closure, we argue that top-down exclusion often generates pressures for bottom-up ascription, whereby employers match supervisors tothe social characteristics, particularly race and ethnicity, of their subordinate work groups. Results from the Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality strongly support our argument and also reveal that bottom-up ethnic matching reduces perceptions ofracial discrimination among subordinates. These results offer a useful corrective to the assumption that elites only reproduce them-selves and underscore the importance ofgroup composition f runderstanding mobility opportunities available to minority workers. One explanation for why racial and ethnic minorities are relatively unlikely to occupy positions of authority in U.S. workplaces is that, like all groups, those in power tend to prefer others like themselves, especially when relations of trust are at stake (Baron and Pfeffer 1994; Kanter 1977; Pfeffer and Salancik 1978:146; Salancik and Pfeffer 1978). Because whites have historically been the primary decision makers in organizations, they benefit most from this in