A diverse account of allyship suggests that many individuals can be allies and that some allyship strategies fit their personalities and character strengths better than others. This study explores the fit between personality profiles and character strengths with gender allyship strategies, expanding notions of who can see themselves as allies to women. As such it highlights the relevance of allyship as an authentic form of expression of people's core sense of self.
Allyship can be categorized into committed strategies (e.g. publicly highlighting women's strengths) that involve social risk or personal sacrifice and relationship-building strategies (e.g. active listening) that build supportive and trusting bonds with marginalized group members. Latent profile analyses of survey data from two randomly split samples of 1,814 and 1,813 men from 103 countries were used to examine mean differences across Big Five personality profiles on committed and relationship-building allyship strategies toward women in the workplace.
Results indicated that people with “well-adjusted” personalities (high on all Big Five traits except low in neuroticism, a personality profile named as such because it is commonly associated with mental health, adaptability, and resilience) viewed both committed and relationship-building strategies as better-fitting to their personalities, relative to the other three personality profiles that emerged in our data. Hierarchical regression analyses further found that five key character strengths (bravery, kindness, fairness, social intelligence and perspective) explained additional variance beyond the Big Five in both committed and relationship-building strategies, reinforcing the value of character strengths in allyship. Exploratory bivariate correlations revealed that among the Big Five, agreeableness and openness were the strongest and most consistent positive predictors of 10 committed and relationship-building allyship strategies.
This study examines the role of personality and consequently broadens the scope of who allies are as well as what allyship can look like, offering an additional path for allyship training through alignment with personality and the development of character strengths.
