The increased public attention on racial injustice after the murder of George Floyd influenced how Black and white employees interacted at work, new University of Washington research suggests.
The study, recently published in Academy of Management Journal, examines how major societal events tied to race and injustice can shape workplace behavior. Researchers specifically investigated how the heightened salience of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement impacted cooperation between Black and white coworkers.
"Organizations are often treated as relatively self-contained systems where formal goals, incentives and task structures determine how employees interact," said co-author Abhinav Gupta, professor of management in the UW Foster School of Business. "But employees do not leave the outside world at the door. When major societal events occur, people carry those emotions, anxieties and identities with them into the workplace."
The study examines responses to "mega-threats," a term used to describe highly-publicized and emotionally-charged events involving violence or injustice against marginalized groups. Such events can threaten people's sense of identity and alter how they relate to others at work. To investigate these dynamics, researchers used an unexpected but enlightening proxy: the National Basketball Association (NBA).
"The NBA is essentially a collection of mini-organizations," Gupta said. "Players from different racial backgrounds must cooperate intensively in order to succeed, and importantly, their cooperation can actually be measured."
Using detailed data from more than 124,000 player-to-player interactions during the 2014 to 2015 NBA season, the researchers tracked how passing rates aligned with the rise of the BLM movement. Passing behavior offered a direct behavioral measure of workplace cooperation.
The findings revealed strikingly different responses among Black and white players. Black players increased cooperation with other Black players - marked by more passes - but did not reduce cooperation with white teammates. The passing behavior of white players showed standard cooperation with other white players, but white players became less likely to cooperate with Black teammates.
The researchers then conducted two experiments in which participants were randomly exposed to either materials describing highly publicized incidents of race-based injustice or unrelated information. Participants were then asked to decide about collaborating with other Black and participants, showing how heightened awareness of these events shapes cooperation.
For Black participants, attention to BLM increased identification with their racial group and strengthened feelings of solidarity with other Black individuals. This increased their willingness to cooperate with fellow Black coworkers.
White participants, however, experienced a different psychological reaction. Researchers found that many white participants experienced a sense of "moral taint" associated with acts of racial injustice committed by members of their racial group. This shame increased concern that attempts at interracial cooperation might be rejected, misunderstood or viewed skeptically by Black coworkers. As a result, many White participants became more hesitant to initiate cooperation across racial lines.
"They did not necessarily become hostile," Gupta said. "Rather, many seemed to retreat inward because they feared that their gestures might be unwelcome or misinterpreted."
The researchers also uncovered an important exception. The tendency of white employees to withdraw from interracial cooperation was significantly weaker when the Black coworker held higher professional status.
In the NBA context, white players remained more willing to cooperate with Black teammates who occupied higher-status positions on the team. This suggests that workplace norms and professional role expectations can partially offset the interpersonal strain created by major societal conflicts.
The study highlights how societal events surrounding race and injustice can shape workplace relationships in subtle but important ways. The researchers argue that organizations need to recognize that employees may react differently to racial injustice depending on whether they identify with the victims or feel implicated by association with the perpetrators.
The study also suggests that organizations hoping to foster productive interracial collaboration during periods of social tension may need to create environments that reduce fears of rejection and encourage open, psychologically safe interaction across group boundaries.
"Both groups may need support, though for very different reasons," Gupta said. "Organizations cannot assume that societal tensions remain outside the workplace. These events can alter patterns of trust, communication and cooperation in ways that directly affect organizational functioning."
