Out on a Limb: The Role of Context and Impression Management in Selling Gender-Equity Issues

Ashford et al · Voice & Silence, Power & Equity · Administrative Science Quarterly · 1998 · Paywalled

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A survey of 1,019 female managers, all graduates of one Midwestern business school, asking under what conditions women will raise gender-equity issues with those above them at work. Susan Ashford, Nancy Rothbard, Sandy Kristin Piderit and Jane Dutton take issue selling, Dutton and Ashford's term for getting those above you to attend to an issue, and test with structural equation modelling what makes people willing to do it. They report that the context mattered more than the individual differences they hypothesised: perceived organisational support and a warm, trusting relationship with critical decision makers raised the perceived chance of success and lowered the perceived image risk, and norms favouring issue selling lowered image risk. Optimism and risk-taking predicted neither, though social identification with women did predict willingness, as did how important and how widespread respondents judged the issue.

The model runs through two assessments: the calculative probability of selling success, and the more emotion-laden image risk, the fear that selling will diminish how one is seen, particularly by powerful others. Probability of success predicted willingness to sell (b = .35), image risk lowered it (b = -.20), and image risk also lowered the perceived chance of success (b = -.46), a path they had theorised as people justifying fear by deciding the odds were low. Top-management openness had no significant effect, which they suggest may be because the relationship with the people one must persuade is more salient than a distant top team. The issue respondents rated was based on a Harvard Business Review case: being interrupted and talked over in meetings, meetings before the meeting, and no women in the senior ranks. In an open-ended survey of a fifth of the population, more than half of the 210 who responded alluded to dangers in raising it; one wrote that she 'would probably win the whiner label, a particularly scarlet letter for a female'.

Its stated limits: a single, potentially divisive issue; women alumnae of one school, so it cannot say whether men decide differently; a cross-sectional self-report survey, where common-method variance is made less likely to account wholly for the results but not ruled out; and omitted variables, among them the institutional and cultural environment.

The paper names psychological safety directly: trusting relationships, it argues, 'create a sense of psychological safety that, in turn, reduces perceived image risk'. It argues that its focus on context suggests inaction, 'the issues that people care about but don't raise', can be as significant as action. We read image risk as a close relative of the interpersonal risk at the heart of psychological safety, here measured for women raising an issue on behalf of their own group.

Ashford, S.J., Rothbard, N.P., Piderit, S.K. and Dutton, J.E. (1998) 'Out on a limb: The role of context and impression management in selling gender-equity issues', Administrative Science Quarterly, 43(1), pp. 23–57.

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