Enacting Equality in Organizations: How Facilitating a Prosocial Bystander Intervention Curriculum Turned Engineering Faculty Members into Agents of Change

The authors report the results of an intervention designed to trigger cultural change in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics academia. Drawing on Dobbin and Kalev’s managerial engagement approach, the authors mobilized faculty members as change agents by teaching them to deliver a prosocial bystander intervention curriculum to their students. Observations and in-depth interviews with faculty members reveal how opportunities to commit the content to memory, share examples from their own lives, and articulate its value to students increased accountability to the material. This led faculty members to expand their definition of bystander intervention beyond direct, in-the-moment confrontation and recognize past instances in which they had been prosocial bystanders, which boosted their confidence to intervene in the future. Interviews with nonfacilitating faculty members and a small, randomized experiment suggest that leading an activity creates greater readiness than merely attending a training. With universities currently under government pressure to eliminate programs that historically signaled compliance with civil rights mandates (e.g., diversity and sexual harassment trainings), it is important to identify more sustainable strategies for cultural change. The present findings chart potential pathways for building prosocial bystander readiness when the risks of intervening and the costs of not intervening may be increasing.