Inclusion Strategies: The Effect of Blacks’ Perspective-Taking in White- Dominated Spaces

Developing healthy workplace relationships in diverse settings and retaining high-performing and talented minority professionals are essential for organizational success. Extant research on perspective-taking validates its effectiveness as a relationship management tool used by racial majority group members. In this paper, we investigate whether Black perspective-takers realize the same benefits when perspective-taking on majority group members, specifically, White supervisors. Our investigation takes place in the context of the accounting profession, in which recruitment and retention of Black employees remains a challenge. We argue that in the face of threats perceived by both minority and majority groups, perspective-taking by Black employees is effective by encouraging the usage of certain social identity management strategies, namely, positive distinctiveness behaviors. Our findings reveal Black perspective-takers are more willing to stay at their current organization and that this occurs because the...