Prof. Armand Bam and Researcher Andrew Innes, Stellenbosch Business School, and Linda Ronnie, Graduate School of Business University of Cape Town, tackle the long-standing issue of mistrust between the workforce and leadership in South Africa to reveal a deep difference in cultural realities rooted both in the colonial past and modern conceptions of western workplace behaviours.

By CoBS Editor Antonin Delobre.  Related research: Reframing the spaces between us: Culture, power and the labour-leadership disconnect in a post-colonial Global South society, Andrew G. Innes, Armand Bam, and Linda Ronnie, International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, 2026.

Imagine a boardroom in a high-rise in Johannesburg or Cape Town. The air is filtered, the coffee is sustainable, and the language of business is a crisp, globalized English. Around the table, management and leadership move with a fluency born of elite universities and international norms. But just floors below, or perhaps miles away in the manufacturing plants and townships, a different reality pulses. This one is rooted in relational ontologies, ancestral veneration, and a history of systemic exclusion.

Between these two worlds lies a chasm that no “diversity and inclusion” seminar has yet managed to bridge. This is the labour-leadership disconnect: a persistent, low-trust environment where the “windows” through which people view the world rarely overlap. In this study, Profs. and researchers Andrew Innes, Armand Bam, and Linda Ronnie argue that this disconnect is not a simple misunderstanding of values, but an existential threat to the social contract, fuelled by hegemonic power structures that decide which culture is “legitimate” and which is “unintelligible”.

The paradox of cultural crossvergence

For years, organizational research has tried to measure culture in South Africa using trait-based models imported from the Global North. These studies often look for “collectivism” or “power distance” and find, somewhat surprisingly, that managers of all races seem to think remarkably alike. But this “similarity” at the top is a mirage that hides a deeper “crossvergence”.

While the “new bourgeoisie” who are the current leadership adopts Western behavioural schemas to align with global capitalist systems, the indigenous working class maintains cultural orientations that are fundamentally spiritual and relational. This is not just a matter of “preference”.

For the worker, the world is understood through isintu – anintegrated system of traditions, customs, and spiritual beliefs that are inseparable from identity – in which a worker views authority or obligation through the lens of ancestor veneration or Afro-communitarianism (ubuntu). The management views it through the lens of transactional efficiency. This is not just disagreement but a manifestation of deep differences in realities.

The overdetermining gravity of class in South Africa

One of the most striking provocations of this research is the call to move beyond race as a simple proxy for culture. While race remains a visible scar of apartheid legacy, class has increasingly become the mechanism through which inequality is reproduced. The study highlights a “skewed distribution of social and cultural capital” that traps individuals in divergent pathways. This is a process of overdetermination.

Here, a person’s position in the hierarchy is not decided by one factor, but by a “resonance or contradiction” of many: education, language, religion, income, and gender. If you speak English with the “correct” accent and possess Western cultural capital, you are pulled into the high-power “ingroup” where your worldviews resonate with the organization. If you do not, you are cast into the “outgroup,” where your cultural frame of reference is delegitimized.

The result is a private sector where, as of 2024, only 14% of top management is Black African despite this group making up 81% of the economically active population. The power is discursive, it sets what is normal in a professional environment.

The spiritual elephant in the boardroom

Perhaps the most neglected aspect of the labour-leadership divide is the role of spiritual beliefs. In post-colonial societies, Western epistemologies were introduced to displace indigenous modes of thought, labelling them “primitive” or “superstitious”. Today, this legacy survives as a form of “epistemic marginalization”.

The data reveals a stark correlation: as income and education rise, the public identification with African Traditional Religion (ATR) falls. But this is often a result of “social desirability bias”, a stigma that forces individuals to hide their actual practices to fit into Western-oriented business environments. While 85% of South Africans identify as Christian, many practice syncretic beliefs, holding ATR values in tandem with Christianity.

By ignoring these hybrid worldviews, leadership remains blind to the foundational worldviews of the majority of their workforce and of indigenous belief systems persisting beneath dominant colonial structures. As such, it creates a legitimacy gap that erodes trust.

Divergent ecocultural effects in South Africa

To map this complexity, the Innes, Bam and Ronnie propose the divergent ecocultural effects conceptual framework. This model visualizes the organization as a series of concentric circles where power and culture converge. At the core is the individual, overdetermined by their identity markers. As we move outward, we see how these markers lead to “divergent ecocultural pathways”:

• High-status individuals experience cultural resonance; their “window” on the world is the same as the organization’s.
• The ability to move between Western and indigenous schemas is a resource. While the elite can “frame-switch” to navigate power, marginalized “monocultural” groups are stuck.
• This creates an asymmetrical pressure. To access opportunity, the worker must undergo “resource-seeking ecocultural change”, strategically abandoning heritage traits to adopt Western norms just to be “intelligible” to the boss.

This asymmetry is the engine of the labour-leadership disconnect. It forces the worker to adapt while the leader remains static, anchored in the comfort of a dominant Western schema.

Reflections on sustainability and the social contract

The implications of this disconnect are not merely academic. They are a menace to the social contract. When workers feel their cultural logic is rendered “unintelligible” or “illegitimate,” trust collapses. This leads to adversarial labour relations, characterized by low cooperation and frequent industrial action.

This reality is reflected in South Africa’s consistent ranking at the bottom of global labour-employer cooperation indices for over a decade. For an organization to be truly “sustainable,” it must look beyond demographic representation. Placing a few individuals of colour in high-ranking roles does nothing if the underlying “Western normative and behavioural schemas” remain the only valid way of working.

True transformation requires that indigenous cultural logics, relational modes of knowing, and spiritual belief systems be granted institutional legitimacy. In the Global South, the workplace is the front line of a “war of position”.

We must stop viewing culture as a static list of traits and start seeing it as a dynamic, power-embedded construct. The “spaces between us” are currently filled with the ghosts of colonial extractive institutions and historical mistrust. To bridge them, leadership must develop the “power-conscious lens” necessary to recognize that their “normal” is someone else’s exclusion.

Useful links:

• Link up with Armand Bam, Andrew Innes and Linda Ronnie on LinkedIn
• Read a related article: Armed Conflict in the Global South: Why development banks may be part of the problem 
• Discover Stellenbosch Business School
• Apply for the Stellenbosch MBA.

Learn more about the Council on Business & Society

The Council on Business & Society (CoBS), visionary in its conception and purpose, was created in 2011, and is dedicated to promoting responsible leadership and tackling issues at the crossroads of business, society, and planet including the dimensions of sustainability, diversity, social impact, social enterprise, employee wellbeing, ethical finance, ethical leadership and the place responsible business has to play in contributing to the common good.  

• Follow the CoBS on LinkedIn
• Download magazines and learning content from the CoBS website downloads page.

Member schools of the Council on Business & Society.

• ESSEC Business School, France, Singapore, Morocco
• FGV-EAESP, Brazil
• School of Management Fudan University, China
• IE Business School, Spain
• Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, India
• Keio Business School, Japan
• Monash Business School, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia
• Olin Business School, USA
• Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, Canada
• Stellenbosch Business School, South Africa
• Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
• Warwick Business School, United Kingdom.