Implicit racial bias in South Africa : how far have manager-employee relations come in ‘the rainbow nation?’

Abstract

This article examines manager-employee relations in democratic South Africa, using an unobtrusive, implicit measure of managers’ racial bias. We test the link between manager automatically activated evaluations of race labels with positive/negative words (implicit racial bias), and employees’ judgement of their manager’s effectiveness, their satisfaction with their manager, and their willingness to engage in extra-role workplace behavior. Results indicated that Indian and white managers were similar in their negative automatic evaluation of African blacks, and that employees of white managers reported higher manager satisfaction, higher manager effectiveness, and a greater likelihood of engaging in extra effort, compared to employees of African black managers. From these results we infer that racial bias has gone ‘underground’ and continues to play a pivotal role in manager-employee relations in ‘the Rainbow Nation’.