When atypical leaders fail to deliver allyship for diversity: The case of an unregulated neoliberal national context

Organisations increasingly embrace allyship as a strategy to enhance support for diversity. The rise of atypical leaders offers hope to individuals from marginalised backgrounds, fostering the belief that these leaders would align themselves as allies and actively promote diversity within organisations. However, this assumption remains empirically untested. This paper investigates the tendency of atypical leaders to engage in allyship behaviours in contexts where regulatory and normative support for diversity is absent. Within unregulated neoliberal environments, the significance of atypical leaders is amplified, as diversity initiatives frequently receive limited backing from typical leaders, and the lack of a regulatory framework subjects these initiatives to considerable strain and risk. Through a qualitative study involving 33 atypical leaders from Turkey, we explore whether atypical leaders exhibit allyship towards diversity. Our findings delineate the conditions that enable and limit the effectiveness of atypical leaders’ allyship in a country with a toxic triangle of diversity. This study illuminates the critical influence of the regulatory environment on the allyship behaviours of atypical leaders, underlining the complex interplay between leadership, regulatory contexts, and allyship practices.