• Inclusion

• Feedback Cycles

• Dealing with diversity

“It’s Not Always Possible to Live Your Life Openly or Honestly in the Same Way” — Workplace Inclusion of Lesbian and Gay Humanitarian Aid Workers in Doctors Without Borders Interpersonal Antecedents to Selective Disclosure of Lesbian and Gay Identities at Work That’s My Cue: The Impact of Organizational, Conversational, and Conversation Partner’s Characteristics on LGB Employees’ Selective Disclosure Decisions at Work

That’s My Cue: The Impact of Organizational, Conversational, and Conversation Partner’s Characteristics on LGB Employees’ Selective Disclosure Decisions at Work

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) workers are at an increased risk of being on the receiving end of stigmatization, harassment, and discrimination in comparison to their heterosexual co-workers. To navigate this, they may engage in selective disclosure – disclosing to some, but not all co-workers, which is a rather common phenomenon among LGBQ workers. To contribute to a better understanding of what drives selective disclosure and how interpersonal antecedents (e.g., dyadic, interaction partner’s characteristics) play a role therein, we conducted continued research by applying the same research design as in Rengers et al. (2021) in a different research setting. Based on ten semi-structured interviews with staff members of a university in the Netherlands, we present three main findings. First, for some LGBQ employees, both dyadic as well as interaction partner characteristics may play a role in selective disclosure decisions. The characteristics they take into consideration may differ per person, however. Second, we find evidence that even LGBQ workers with low sexual identity salience may experience social identity threats, that either reduce their being to the single dimension of their sexuality, or that hamper their membership to a relevant social group. Third, we find that the proactive, reactive, and conditional disclosure approaches we identified previously may be more dynamic than we had assumed: rather than these being fixed traits, they may be conditional on situational characteristics. These findings are discussed in light of literature on (selective) disclosure decisions, identity management, and inclusion.

How do interpersonal characteristics play a role in LGBQ academics’ selective sexual identity disclosure decisions across social relationships with different colleagues?

• Collected during project

• Interview

Yes

• Atlas.ti
• .docx
• .pdf

• Structured
• Unstructured

• Dutch
• English

A Dutch university

08/03/2021

12/04/2021

None