Strength-based organizational approaches facilitate workplace opportunities for people from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds

The workplace stands as one of the most powerful drivers of societal (in)equality. For employees from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds, it can represent both a ticket toward upward mobility and a consequential source of stigma. Four studies build on emerging strength-based research to test whether workplaces can challenge this stigma by creating overarching cultures that recognize the beneficial skills employees gain from their otherwise marginalized identities. Study 1 provided foundational insights into these "strength-based organizational approaches" and their implications for key outcomes derived from the State Authenticity as Fit to Environment model. Employees from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds were especially unlikely to report that their workplaces valued their identities and associated skills, which partially explained subsequent disparities in employees' broad sense of comfort and efficacy at work. Studies 2a and 2b established these patterns experimentally by demonstrating that exposing participants to a workplace that does communicate a strength-based organizational approach facilitated these professionally productive outcomes while increasing participants' likelihood of disclosing their marginalized identities within a job application task. Study 3 extended these findings to consider how the approaches may also indirectly expand employees' equitable access to opportunity through reducing common biases among their supervisors. Randomly assigning workplace supervisors to briefly engage with a company that highlighted the value of employees' lower socioeconomic status backgrounds increased supervisors' positive evaluations and likelihood of promoting these employees by 38% relative to an active control condition. Collectively, these preregistered findings illuminate new opportunities to improve workplace functioning and pinpoint the organizational forces underlying person-context interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).