Job pursuits as discrimination: stereotype contents of organizational categories and job pursuit intentions in South Korea

South Korean labor market suffers from labor imbalance across organizational categories: while some categories experience intense competition for positions, others struggle with severe job shortage. Collective category-based preferences of job seekers are underlying this problem. This study explains this phenomenon as an intergroup dynamic adopting discrimination and stereotypes from social psychology. Applying the Stereotype Content Model, this study demonstrates the warmth and competence stereotypes associated with various organizational categories and how these stereotypes influence job pursuit intentions. The main findings across two samples (N = 290) and two lists of organizational categories are as follows. First, warmth and competence differentiated perceptions of the categories. These categories constituted three to four clusters characterized by high or low levels of warmth and competence. Second, these clusters differed in job pursuit intention, which demonstrated that discriminatory job pursuits are, to some extent, rooted in stereotypes of organizational categories. Third, competence was a stronger predictor of job pursuit intention than warmth, and warmth’s effect varied across clusters. These findings suggested that job pursuits toward an organizational category are primarily driven by instrumental intentions, with prosocial intentions playing a secondary role depending on the stereotypes. Overall, this study introduces and validates the intergroup relations perspective as a framework for understanding category-based job pursuit behaviors, offering a robust framework for future research. From this perspective, institutional-, organizational-, and individual-level strategies to mitigate discriminatory job pursuit practices are discussed.