Published on: April 27, 2026 at 8:45 am
By Marc Hogan
People with privileged backgrounds in the wealthier social classes tend to dominate the leadership ranks of professional workplaces. But savvy leaders and hiring managers may want to look past prestigious university credentials or elite employment histories to seek out job candidates who have shown stick-to-itiveness.
Academy of Management Scholar Sean Martin of the University of Virginia said that in all of his research, he’s never found a positive correlation between people’s social-class background and their job performance.
“What I would caution a lot of managers to do is to start paying more attention to signs of persistence, grit, and upward mobility,” Martin said. “People who started in lower positions but have reached the exact same places as people who’ve come from more privileged positions tend to have an excellent work ethic and make great employees and, eventually, leaders.”
For example, Martin imagined two recruits to his business school, one who went to an Ivy League school, the other who went to a state school.
“The Ivy League person looks like they have a track record of eliteness, but they’ve reached the same place,” Martin said. “One of them came a lot farther to get there, and for some reason that gets devalued.”
Leadership characteristics such as less self-focused behavior, greater empathetic accuracy, and sheer tenacity are more pronounced in this “upwardly mobile” category than among people from high-social-class backgrounds, according to Martin.
“But those privileged candidates are exactly the people that we tend to select to hire or promote, even if there are more qualified people from a lower-social-class background,” he said. “It’s a massive miss by the business community.”
In his research, Martin has found that adjectives respondents provided when asked to describe people who have been upwardly mobile were all positive, with phrases such as “hard-working,” “smart,” and “competent.”
“If you ask most people, they know this is what we want,” he explained. “But they’re not choosing it when they have an opportunity to hire somebody from a less privileged background who they’ve interviewed, or when they have an opportunity to promote somebody.”
Upward mobility requires hard work and pursuing opportunities that may be less abundant than for privileged people, according to Martin. What is needed, based on evidence he has seen, is for more gatekeepers such as human-resources executives and hiring managers who are in a position of power to consider people who are upwardly mobile when they’re conducting interviews and selecting candidates to hire for open positions, as well as in decisions about who to promote, give bonuses to, and solicit for input.
“Hard work’s happening,” he said. “Opportunities, less so.”
