Published on: July 21, 2026 at 10:00 am
The recent backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which the Trump administration has fueled, has led many organizations to focus on meritocracy as the goal in hiring and promotion across private-sector businesses, government agencies, and academia.
But according to Academy of Management Scholar Emilio Castilla of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, building a true meritocracy is far more demanding than it sounds. It requires sustained attention and responsibility—and transparency—around a simple question: how each organization defines and evaluates merit in practice.
“When we try to implement meritocracy in practice, we need to recognize that managers often have different ideas of what merit means,” Castilla explains. “Those judgments are shaped by preferences, assumptions, and even biases, which makes it difficult to apply standards of merit consistently.”
Rather than treating judgments as an individual failing, Castilla emphasizes the need for organizational leaders to take responsibility for identifying organizational solutions to eliminate biases and inefficiencies in merit definition.
“I argue for interventions at the organizational level,” he says. “Focusing only on individuals and assuming the talent management system is neutral will not solve the problem.”
In practice, this means examining how decisions are made—and where bias and inefficiencies may enter—through careful use and analysis of talent management data.
Castilla stresses that organizations should systematically track patterns in recruitment, hiring, evaluation, and promotion: “Solutions to unfair treatment of candidates and employees due to biases begin with collecting good data on the way that executives and managers are making hiring and promotion decisions.
“You need to look closely at these key talent management processes,” he says. “Who applies? Who gets hired? Who performs well? Who gets promoted? These patterns allow you to identify where disparities may emerge and whether/where interventions are most needed.”
Such analysis, he argues, is essential to ensuring that meritocratic systems actually function as intended: “There is no meritocracy without equal opportunity.”
At the same time, Castilla warns that even well-intentioned efforts to promote meritocracy can produce unintended consequences—a dynamic he calls the “meritocracy paradox.” He cites a set of experiments he conducted with Stephen Benard of Indiana University in which managers were asked to allocate bonuses under different organizational conditions. One group of managers was tasked with deciding on bonuses for an organization with a standard annual performance review. Another group of managers was tasked with allocating bonuses for an organization that strongly valued meritocracy in decision-making.
“The managers in the ‘meritocratic condition’ actually gave, on average, lower bonuses to women who had the same level of performance as men,” Castilla says.
“Emphasizing meritocracy created a false sense of fairness. It made managers less likely to question their own decisions and more likely to let gender biases influence their bonus decisions.”
In other words, invoking meritocracy can sometimes reduce scrutiny rather than increase it, contributing to unfairness and biases.
“It can give managers a kind of cover,” he says. “So, it is not enough to emphasize meritocracy rhetorically. You need to monitor the process carefully and design systems that ensure it is working as intended, rather than reinforcing or even introducing inequities.
“The pursuit of meritocracy is much more difficult than it first appears.”
