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 identities 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 and that a simple advocacy-injection intervention mitigates the negative effects of discordance. Specifically, 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), but this penalty is attenuated when they inject explicit personal advocacy into the statistical message (Study 2). Our findings contribute to the theoretically complex study of voicing up against workplace inequality and suggest that sharing explicit personal advocacy should be encouraged in organizational practices.
