Beyond Backlash: Advancing Dominant-Group Employees’ Learning, Allyship, and Growth through Social Identity Threat

Current scholarship about dominant-group employees’ experiences of social identity threat highlights how threat can lead to backlash, undermining these employees’ support for marginalized-group employees at work. We alternatively suggest that social identity threat can also inspire dominant-group employees to learn how to better support marginalized-group employees. Leveraging intergroup threat theory and applying transformational learning theory, our theoretical model describes how, and the conditions under which, social identity threat can trigger a process of learning whereby dominant-group employees update their interpretations of dominant and marginalized social identity groups, and relations between the groups. We also note implications of learning for employees’ allyship behaviors and growth. Recognizing that learning occurs via interactions with colleagues, we introduce dialogue across perspectives as a way for dominant-group employees to obtain feedback and update their interpretations. Moreover, we elucidate individual and organizational factors that facilitate both openness to learning in response to social identity threat, and the likelihood of dialogue across perspectives occurring in organizations. Ultimately, while prior theory has described the perils of social identity threat, our theory speaks to the silver lining of threat for dominant-group employees’ learning, allyship, and growth in organizations.