We’re All in This Together: The Incremental Impact of Inclusive Leadership on Majority and Minority Employees

Abstract

Inclusive leadership (IL) has emerged as a key framework for fostering inclusion and unlocking diversity’s benefits. However, questions remain regarding IL’s distinctiveness, incremental validity, and (potentially) differential effects on (double-)minoritized employees. This study examines IL’s incremental variance over other leadership styles in predicting inclusion climate, innovative culture, recommending your organization to others, job satisfaction, leader effectiveness, mission match, and turnover intention. We establish IL as a uniquely impactful leadership style using hierarchical regression and relative weight analysis on over 300,000 U.S. Federal government employees. Additionally, we examine IL’s differential effects across protected employment identities, including women, Black, Asian, Other, Hispanic, disabled, over 40 years of age, and veteran employees, with specific attention to double-minoritized groups. Our findings reveal that while IL broadly benefits all employees above and beyond showing consideration, initiating structure, and developmental leadership, its impact varies across identities, highlighting the need for tailored approaches to inclusion. We also explore IL’s variability across agencies, offering insights into how agency-level racial and gender diversity influence IL’s effectiveness. By advancing intersectionality research and providing robust evidence of IL’s distinctiveness and predictive power, our work contributes to the theoretical understanding of leadership and inclusion. We address calls for more nuanced and large-scale studies on IL, expanding its applicability to diverse institutional settings while highlighting its potential for fostering equitable and inclusive workplace environments.