“I am Afraid of You”: Social Interactions with Challenging Managers for Women of Color

• In Event: 20851 - White Collar, Blue Collar, Raced Collars: Racialized Work Spaces

Abstract

Understanding the future of work for women requires investigating the experiences of nonwhite workers, whose labor, opportunities, and working conditions have historically been shaped by structural inequalities and interpersonal bias. One barrier toward the professional success of women in corporate is working with challenging managers, or leaders who expect high performance and effort while offering insufficient support and resources. This paper draws on career-history interviews with 58 women of color in the corporate sector, to answer the following question: How do women of color describe social exchanges with challenging managers? Employing grounded theory tools and social exchange theory, we develop a framework for understanding the resources and expectations of women of color when facing consistent, low-quality exchanges with their managers. The four-phase process model describes the social exchange between employees and challenging managers during the formal review process. We delineate how challenging managers limit the success for women of color in ways that are often hidden. This model exposes how workplace gaslighting is central to understanding a manager’s performance feedback and corresponding confusion that women of color experience. Magnifying the lens around manager-employee interactions for women of color, we contribute to research on racial and gender inequality in white collar work.

Authors

• Melissa Victoria Abad, Stanford University

• Ashley M Bennett, Stanford University

• Sofia Kennedy, Stanford University