Why Employees With Working-Class Roots Are Better at Getting Their Ideas Heard
MIT Sloan Management Review ·
Nimble Made/Unsplash Getting manager buy-in for a good idea is harder than it should be. Our research points to a communication style that reliably breaks through this wall — and that is disproportionately exhibited by white-collar employees with working-class origins. We studied how employees present ideas to their managers by conducting a field survey of […]
Nimble Made/Unsplash
Getting manager buy-in for a good idea is harder than it should be. Our research points to a communication style that reliably breaks through this wall — and that is disproportionately exhibited by white-collar employees with working-class origins.
We studied how employees present ideas to their managers by conducting a field survey of employees and their managers in a shared-services division of a multinational engineering company in India (218 employees, 32 managers); running three follow-up behavioral experiments involving more than 1,000 working adults and university students; and interviewing dozens of professionals. In each study, we found that employees from working-class backgrounds who had moved into white-collar work, whom we call upward transitioners , were more likely to acknowledge that they might be missing something, invite the manager’s perspective, and appear open to revising their position.
In interviews, 77% of upward transitioner employees described communicating this way, compared with just 15% of colleagues who had always occupied higher-class positions.
We then tested whether this difference in tone and attitude affects how managers respond to an idea.
Source: Y. Spriha, S. Tangirala, R. Shu, et al., “How Employees Who Have Made Upward Social Class Transitions Get Heard in the Workplace,” Academy of Management Journal 69, no. 2 (April 2026): 243-274, https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2023.0042 .
In one experiment, some participants were asked to take on the role of either a low- or high-power manager. Each listened to a participant cast as an employee deliver an idea either as a firm recommendation, in a highly confident manner, or as a more open-ended recommendation, in a humble tone that allowed for input. Each manager was asked to rate how willing they were to act on a recommendation delivered in one of the two styles. Among managers cast as having little power, the two pitches landed nearly the same way. Among managers cast as powerful individuals — people with the most resources to act and the most to lose by publicly reversing course — the open-ended pitch landed far better.
Why? Communicating in an open manner lowers a manager’s defensiveness, shifting the conversation from who’s right to what could work. Inviting a manager to help shape the idea prompts them to develop a sense of ownership over it. Both dynamics are important when pitching ideas to powerful managers, who can be resistant to ideas that are not their own.