Black and abused: understanding who Black employees hold accountable for their mistreatment

Abstract

In an effort to extend workplace accountability research, our studies identify an actor that is accountable for the mistreatment of an understudied group of employees: Black employees. We accomplish this by leveraging insights from the attributions of accountability and anti-Black racism literatures. Subsequently, we adopt an overall socio-psychological perspective and integrate social cognitive and organizational resentment theories to explain why organizational leaders that are perceived to support anti-Black sentiments are more likely to mistreat Black employees. Across three studies, we find that supervisors perceived to be Trump-supporting, in comparison to those perceived to be Trump-opposing, are more likely to display abusive supervision toward Black employees. In turn, as Black employees experience abusive supervision, they develop organizational resentment as they attribute this mistreatment to their employer. We also find that the impact of abusive supervision on organizational resentment is weaker when Black employees’ organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) is relatively low compared to relatively high. This is because Black employees with relatively low OBSE are more likely to blame themselves for the abuse. Theoretical contributions, practical implications, limitations, and future research are discussed.

Keywords:

• Attributions of accountability
• abusive supervision
• Black employees
• Black scholarship
• organizational resentment

Acknowledgements

We thank The PhD Project, Management Faculty of Color Association and Management Doctoral Student Association Research Collaboration Initiative, which served as the impetus for this project. We also thank our Associate Editor, Dr. Katerina Gonzalez and our anonymous reviewers for their very helpful and developmental comments offered during the peer-review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Notes

1 Although we focus on supervisors perceived to the Trump-supporting, we do not believe that this phenomenon is solely associated with former United States President Donald J. Trump. We believe this phenomenon is also evident outside the US, particularly in other far right-wing elected officials/politicians. Examples would include Scott Morrison (Australia), Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), and Marine Le Pen (France). We believe this phenomenon is also seen at a state-level within the US with elected governors, such as Ron DeSantis (Florida) and Greg Abbott (Texas).

2 Construct proliferation is a problem facing the field of management (Shaffer et al., 2016). Subsequently, as opposed to contributing to this issue, we used existing measures and simply shifted the referent. Thus, as opposed to the media as the target, the target was the participant’s employing organization.

3 In a separate data collection effort that used the same exact measures, we obtained 130 responses from White employees to evaluate if White employees experienced different levels of abusive supervision between perceived Trump-supporting supervisors and perceived Trump-opposing supervisors. In the sample of all White employees, ANOVA revealed no significant differences regarding abusive supervision among perceived Trump-supporting supervisors (M = 1.82; SD = 1.09), perceived Trump-opposing supervisors (M = 1.59; SD = 1.19), and those who were unsure (M = 1.68; SD = 1.01). The non-significant findings affirm King and colleagues (2023) proposition that anti-Black sentiments endorsed by organizational leaders is a distinct manifestation of anti-Black racism.

4 In a study of 93 working professionals, we validated our single-item measure used in Study 1 against the five-item measure used in Study 2. The single-item measure and five-item measure of abusive supervision were highly correlated (r = .84, p < .001). The single-item measure (r = .52, p < .001) and five-item measure (r = .56, p < .001) were both correlated with the same four-item measure of organizational resentment used in Study 2.