Organizational norms and gender identity contexts shape when pronoun-sharing is perceived as disingenuous allyship: Evidence of a normative eclipsing effect

Abstract

Pronoun-sharing is regarded as an inclusive practice targeted toward gender minorities. Though individual employees sharing pronouns results in the organization's higher-level management being perceived as more likely to engage in LGBT+ allyship, the impact of pronoun-sharing social norms on perceptions of individuals and companies remains unexplored. Across four experiments (N = 1365), we examined how perceived norms and employee gender identity impact when pronoun-sharing practices shift perceptions of both the target employee and the organization. When all cisgender employee team members shared pronouns, both cisgender (Studies 1, 3–4) and gender minority participants (Study 2) perceived an employee's pronoun-sharing as more externally motivated and the employee as less likely to display LGBT+ allyship compared to when pronoun-sharing was not the organizational norm. Further, we document a normative eclipsing effect, where lower-level employees who engage in pronoun-sharing norms (relative to sharing without a norm) are perceived as having management who are more likely to engage in LGBT+ allyship and are met with greater procedural fairness expectations (Study 2–3). Results suggest that normative pronoun-sharing may boost favorable perceptions of organizations but not individual employees. Yet, when evidence-based cues of inclusion are present, such as the presence of nonbinary employees (Study 3–4), both employees and management who engage in pronoun sharing are viewed as more likely to engage in LGBT+ allyship, regardless of the pronoun-sharing norm. These findings demonstrate the need to consider how context norms of identity-safety cues impact their utility to promote perceptions of allyship of individual actors and organizations.