Male Privilege Awareness and Relational Well-Being at Work: An Allyship Pathway

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 genderparity 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.