A fundamental culture change towards more inclusion in organizations is required to fully utilize the benefits of diversity. However, the know-how of creating a culture of inclusion has been underexplored. To address this gap, we explain how the diversity rhetoric and narratives organizations utilize play an essential role in the creation of such a culture through their impact on social majority middle managers’ identity as leaders and their inclusive leadership behaviors. Drawing from the leadership perspective of culture change and the organizational change literature, we theorize a progress model of culture creation, such that organizational diversity rhetoric and narratives can either activate or subdue threats to social majority middle managers’ leader identity, which can in turn decrease or increase their inclusive leadership behaviors. In this way, behaviors modeled by middle managers shape the culture of the team they lead, and the team-level culture change will eventually spread to affect the organization-level culture. We further propose two moderating mechanisms affecting the strength of the threat response: middle managers’ past experience managing diversity and change and their perceived fairness of the organizational diversity policies.
