Comparing fear of success and fear of appearing incompetent among African Americans’ and Whites’ business candidates

Abstract

This re search was de signed to in ves ti gate what dif fer ences might ex ist between grad u at ing Af ri can Amer i can and White busi ness stu dents re gard ing achieve ment mo ti va tion as de ter mined by their fear of suc cess and fear of ap pear ing in com pe tent and whether there ex ists any mod er at ing in flu ence based upon their at ti tude to ward the role of women in so ci ety. The sam ple con sisted of 99 Af ri can Amer i can stu dents and 102 White stu dents.Af ri can Amer i cans scored sig nif i cantly lower than Whites on the Fear of Ap pear ing In com pe tent Scale. Like wise, Af ri can Amer i can women scored sig nif i cantly lower than white women on this scale. No dif fer ences were found in the scores among Af ri can Amer i can Males and White males on the Fear of Ap pear ing In com pe tent Scale. For the en tire sam ple, those with a pro gres sive view of women scored higher on the Fear of Suc cess Scale than those with tra di tional views of women. Achieve ment mo ti va tion among the groups of re spon dents is also eval u ated.

Exploring fear of appearing incompetent, competency pressure, tactics and perceptions in negotiations

“…Pressures to show competency are abundant on many levels in organizational life and vary across professional roles and organizations (Jamieson, 2004;Thériault et al, 2009). Moreover, competency pressure in the workplace has been shown to generate negative and inadvertent consequences (Carey and Nahavandi, 1996), such as potentially inhibiting helpseeking behavior (Lee, 2002;DePaulo and Fisher, 1980), bullying (Jamieson, 2004), stereotype threat (Tomkiewicz and Bass, 1999;Tomkiewicz et al, 2005), denial of the importance of competency (von Hippel et al, 2005) and/or perceived stress (Cheung and Tang, 2010). Our research extends this limited literature to show that, through competency pressure, FAI relates to a more competitive style of negotiating and this is connected to the subjective perception of the negotiation and the counterpart.…”

“…Fear of appearing incompetent and competency pressure Although there have been calls for more research (Rosenfeld et al, 1995;Tracy et al, 2007), FAI has received only limited and dispersed attention in the organizational and management literatures (Brenner and Tomkiewicz, 1982;Tomkiewicz et al, 2005) and virtually no attention in the negotiation literature. FAI was first described as an emotional trait (Good and Good, 1973), an attitude (Tomkiewicz and Bass, 1999) and later as a predisposition that can activate an emotional state in a particular context (Haber, 2010).…”