Race impacts our lives. Our neighborhoods are often divided along racial lines, with effects on health and educational outcomes. The jobs we pursue are also often racially skewed — for example Black people, who make up 13% of the U.S. population, disproportionately occupy between 20-25% of lower paying, less secure, service-oriented jobs.

But how does race affect everyday life in the workplace?

In a talk on Fuqua’s LinkedIn page, Angelica Leigh, an associate professor of management and organizations at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, provided an overview of her past and ongoing research centered on organizations and race, including the effectiveness of acts of racial allyship, and how “mega threats” impact the wellness of racial minority employees.

“Black workers, more than any other racial group, report that being Black makes it a lot harder for them to be successful at work,” Leigh said. “Yet the effects of race in organizations are often ignored.” 

Mega Threats

The conversation around productivity and managerial practices often ignores the unique experience of racial minority employees, Leigh said.

Leigh said she remembers her feelings, during her time in graduate school, while she watched social media videos of two Black men being killed by the police.

The first man, Alton Sterling, was killed in Baton Rouge, LA, outside of a gas station. The second, Philando Castile, was killed during a traffic stop with his girlfriend and his 4-year-old daughter in the car.

“I watched those two police shootings back-to-back within 48 hours of each other,” Leigh said, “and I remember feeling extremely distraught, no longer able to invest in the research that I was doing as a grad student that I had found so interesting the day before, and I was really consumed by these negative emotions and this experience of threat.”

The episodes inspired Leigh’s research on “mega-threats” — racially charged, highly publicized tragic events that cripple the ability of minority employees to resume life and business as usual.

In that research, Leigh and her UNC colleague Shimul Melwani studied Asian American workers in the wake of the Atlanta area spa shootings that targeted Asian American businesses, as well as Black workers after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

They found that both groups experienced “heightened embodied threat” after such events, as well as “concern for their own safety,” Leigh said.

“These events ultimately lead employees to withdraw from their work tasks and from their coworkers,” she said.

The research found that if racial minority employees do not feel as if it is “psychologically safe” to talk at work about their experiences related to race, this leads to suppression and withdrawal.

“This suppression process really consumes energy and prevents you from being able to invest in your work tasks,” Leigh said. 

When discussions on race in the workplace are safer, organizations can build a buffer against the negative consequences of these mega-threats, she said.

Racial allyship

After the killing of George Floyd in 2020, organizations around the country responded with a wave of statements of support and a flurry of initiatives aimed at fostering diversity in the workplace. 

Such initiatives were meant to express a sense of allyship with racial minorities, Leigh said.

However, many of the leaders of these programs were members of the same racial groups the initiatives were meant to help, which led Professor Leigh to investigate whether this racial identity overlap may impact employee perceptions of leaders advocating for racial justice.

“We found that same-race allyship is particularly risky for racial minority leaders, because people view them as engaging in in-group favoritism,” Leigh said, “a perception that is reduced when the leader advocates for a different racial group.”

But her research also found the positive effect of what the researchers call “voice amplification framing,” that is leaders framing their advocacy as promoting the ideas of other employees, not just their own ideas.

“When leaders frame their allyship by stating that, ‘these ideas have been brought to my attention by (some lower-level employees), and I'm trying to use my leadership position to highlight these voices,’ we found this voice amplification framing reduced perceptions of in-group favoritism, especially for same-race allyship,” Leigh said.

The elusive language leaders use to address racial incidents

If psychological safety is a prerequisite of a functional workplace, companies should foster open talks about race, Leigh said.

However, what seems to emerge is an increasing elusiveness in the language leaders use to address race, she said.

“There was a recent incident at a U.S. college in the U.S where a student was accused of carving a racial slur into their teammate's chest,” Leigh said. “And the university official that communicated about this event said that the university was profoundly distressed about what happened and the impact it had on those who have been ‘underrepresented’ — not the impact that it has had on Black students.”

Such use of elusive language around race and racism is very common — especially from White people, Leigh’s forthcoming research found — and is driven by concerns of offending other groups.

But what’s emerging from these new studies is that when statements directly mention race or racism, they don’t generate as much backlash as some people fear, while still benefiting the affected groups, who experience the support as more genuine.

“When a leader specifically calls out the fact that this racial slur, carved into someone's chest, is a racist incident that has no place in this organization, our study participants don’t feel offended by this statement,” Leigh said. “And individuals who are members of the negatively impacted group feel more supported, when there are direct mentions of race.” 

“Our early findings from this research suggest that concerns around offending people by directly mentioning race may be exaggerated,” she said.