Messenger-Message Discordance: Who Speaks Up (and How) Matters In Advocating For Workplace Equality

Authors:

Abstract: Voicing up on the state of workplace disparities is an important strategy for raising awareness and expressing advocacy, but doing so effectively depends on who speaks up and how they do it. Across two pre-registered experiments (N=1,921), we examined how messenger identity and message content affect perceptions of the messenger’s self-interest and other-interest—two primary motives for voicing up about workplace disparities. We show evidence of a messenger-message discordance effect: compared to non-dominant messengers (who have demographic concordance with the disadvantaged groups), White men (who have demographic discordance with the disadvantaged groups) are penalized in other-interest perceptions when sharing statistics on workplace disparities (Studies 1 & 2). We also find this penalty is attenuated by a simple advocacy-injection intervention (Study 2). Our findings contribute to the theoretically complex study of speaking up for workplace equality and suggest that sharing explicit personal advocacy should be encouraged in organizational practices.

Track: DEI

Keywords: Voice; advocacy; person perception; other-interest and self-interest; social identity; workplace inequality