Research

Publication

Male Privilege Awareness and Relational Well-Being at Work: An Allyship Pathway. (with Aparna Joshi, and Carolyn Dang) Accepted at Psychology of Men and Masculinities

To address long-standing gender inequity in the workplace, scholars and practitioners have called for men to enact ally work to better support and advocate for women at work. Integrating prior research on allyship with positive organizational scholarship, we propose an enrichment-based perspective on allyship that suggests that male allyship is a mechanism by which male privilege awareness translates into relational well-being at work. We theorize that the relational benefits of male allyship could offset the previously studied costs of engaging in allyship at work. While past research has highlighted barriers to men’s involvement in gender parity initiatives, we find that men can mobilize social support by engaging in intergroup helping behaviors at work. Using a sample of male supervisors in the United States, Study 1 finds that male privilege awareness has a positive impact on male allyship at work. In addition, Study 2 shows that male allyship mediates the relationship between male privilege awareness and men’s relational well-being at work. All in all, our study shows that men can reap relational benefits following their enactment of allyship and that male privilege awareness is an important antecedent in this process.

Dissertation

The Effects of Formative Family Experiences (FFE) on Men’s Engagement in Work-Family Initiatives.

Committee: Aparna Joshi (Chair), Forrest Briscoe, Carolyn Dang, Stephen Humphrey, and Karen Winterich

My dissertation focuses on the role of men in the successful implementation of work-family initiatives. Specifically, this project explores how men’s formative family experiences shape their values and views about female workers and fatherhood. To be more specific, I test two contrasting arguments in my dissertation: the modeling process vs. the compensatory process. Both arguments have an assumption that men’s formative family experiences with parental involvement, especially the involvement of their fathers, impact their gender role beliefs and involvement in childcare and housework in their current families.

Work Under Revision/Review

Name of paper and journal removed to protect anonymity in review process. Reject and Resubmit at Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process. (with Aparna Joshi, Forrest Briscoe, and Carolyn Dang)

This project that I have led highlights the joint effects of political polarization and organizational context on men’s reward allocation to female employees. Across three experiments, my coauthors and I found that political polarization among males predicted gender biases in reward allocation, such that polarized conservative males favored male over female employees, but polarized liberal males favored female over male employees (study 1). These tendencies were further susceptible to the organizational context (a diversity versus merit focus) (study 2a). Additionally, a perceived loss in power helped to explain why polarized conservative males rewarded female employees less in the diversity context than in the merit context (study 2b).

Name of paper and journal removed to protect anonymity in review process. Under Review at Journal of Applied Psychology. (with Anjier Chen and Liuxin Yan)

In organizations, subtle forms of racism are prevalent but often overlooked. Even though academics have recently encouraged minority employees to confront racism, it is unclear how dominant group members who observe such confrontations would react to these efforts. Accordingly, my co-authors and I test whether confrontation is a one-size-fits-all solution for all racial minorities that face discrimination. More specifically, we are curious whether the types of confrontation and/or race of the confronter would lead to different reactions from dominant group members in the workplace.

Works In Progress

The Interactive Effects of Binding Moral Foundations and Diversity Initiatives on Organizational Citizenship Behavior: Mediating role of Distributive Justice Perception. (with Carolyn Dang and Aparna Joshi)

Based on a field study and student experiments, we found that individuals’ endorsements of the binding moral foundation moderates the positive relationship between an organization’s diversity initiatives and peer-rated OCB. In organizations where individuals perceive a stronger degree of adoption of diversity initiatives, they are less likely to engage in OCB when they also endorse a binding moral foundation. Furthermore, we found that the interactive effects of the diversity initiatives and binding moral foundation on OCB is mediated through perceptions of distributive justice. All in all, our findings provide a novel angle to understand the positive spillover of diversity initiatives.

Change Narratives as Expressions of Male Leader Prototypes. (with Aparna Joshi and Alexandra Rheinhardt)

My co-authors and I seek to unpack the influence of male leader prototypes in the context of strategic change implementation. We focus on manhood acts based on restraint/expression of dominance and emotion. We believe that in the context of the upper echelons of firms, the leader’s ability to manage strategic change is an important metric of leader effectiveness. We expect to shed new light on the complex behavioral repertoires that male CEOs adopt to implement changes in organizations.