Confronting Subtle Workplace Mistreatment: The Importance of Leaders as Allies

Workplace discrimination, harassment, exclusion, and incivility incidents are often subtle in nature but can nonetheless have deleterious impacts on targets (Zurbrügg and Miner, 2016). Additionally, there are often few (if any) clearly defined social norms regarding these types of behaviors in organizations (DeSouza, 2011). Interventions targeting the subtle aspects of workplace mistreatment may not only be a fruitful avenue for reducing or eliminating the development of these types of mistreatment, but may also prevent more overt forms of negative workplace interactions (Jones et al., 2017). Because organizational leaders are sometimes bystanders to mistreatment, we propose that organizations should develop leaders into allies who are trained to intervene as well as to develop and clarify workplace norms prohibiting subtle forms of targeted workplace mistreatment. We generalize specifically from research on discrimination against LGBT employees, because they have received little legal protection until recently, as well as on best practices for providing support to these employees and propose that initiatives used recently by both unions and universities can provide insights into the effectiveness of allies in creating organizational climate change. An ally is typically defined as someone who supports the reduction of homophobia and actively provides support and equality for LGBT individuals. More generally, we extend this term to involve someone who is identifiable by their commitment to challenging interpersonal and institutional forms of workplace mistreatment against a member of any minority group. When allies are bystanders to subtle mistreatment, they can use this commitment to challenge perpetrators and illuminate biases.