Barriers to Addressing Social Issues in Organizations and How to Overcome Them

Organizations are increasingly involving themselves in social issues such as sustainability, racial justice, and COVID-19 safety measures. But in order to engage in a formal effort to help such causes, someone must first raise awareness of these social issues within the organization. Two relevant processes through which this can be done is issue selling and allyship. Issue selling refers to employee efforts to raise awareness of and direct attention of higher-ups toward issues that the organization can address (Dutton & Ashford, 1993). Initial research on issue selling focused on employees selling issues that were more directly relevant to organizational performance, but as employees have gained comfort advocating for issues in the workplace, issue selling research has expanded to include employees’ selling of social issues that are not directly related to an organization’s core business (Mayer, Ong, Sonenshein, & Ashford, 2019; Sonenshein, 2006, 2009). Allyship refers to dominant group members taking actions to order improve the experiences of nondominant group members (e.g., reducing experiences of discrimination; promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion). Allyship can take many forms, including advocacy of relevant issues in the organization, providing social support to nondominant group members, and educating oneself on issues connected to allyship. Collectively, issue selling and allyship are important because they both capture important ways that people make progress on social issues in organizations, broadly speaking. People interested in issue selling and allyship, however, often face many barriers, such as fatigue, a lack of self-confidence, local norms discouraging these behaviors, and competing workplace demands. These barriers prevent individuals from taking actions to address social issues they care deeply about and prevent organizations from addressing social issues that they have taken a purported interest in undertaking. Therefore, it is critical that research continues to understand the barriers that people face when advocating for social issues and the factors that allow them to overcome these barriers. The proposed symposium brings together interdisciplinary and multimethod research that collectively identifies new barriers to people’s advocacy for social issues and/or new individual-level and institutional-level considerations for promoting social issues in organizations. The four papers use a variety of methodologies to understand how people advocate for social issues: ethnography, interviews, surveys, and archival sources. In addition, they focus on a number of pressing issues that our society faces today: sustainable development, climate change, diversity and inclusion. The Unintended Consequences of Meaning Well – The Interplay between Paradox and Issue Selling Presenter: Katrin Heucher; U. of Michigan An Exploration of How Dominant Group Members Evaluate and React to their Own Allyship Failure Presenter: Melanie Prengler; U. of Virginia, Darden School of Business Building Motivational Resilience in Issue Sellers Presenter: Sara B. Soderstrom; U. of Michigan Presenter: Todd Schifeling; Fox School of Business, Temple U. Presenter: Madeline Ong; Texas A&M U. Disagreement between Issue Sellers and Buyers about Expectations of Seller Risk and Success Presenter: Izzy Gainsburg; Harvard Kennedy School Presenter: Laura Sonday; Kenan-Flagler Business School, U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Presenter: Madeline Ong; Texas A&M U. Presenter: Julia Lee Cunningham; U. of Michigan