South Africa now has one of the most highly developed sets of
anti-discrimination laws in the world. Attempting to regulate relationships
among gender and ethnic groups in the workplace involves compliance to
employment equity legislation in order to redress the imbalances between
dominant and disadvantaged groups both at corporate and country level,
as well as consciously managing multicultural workplaces. Recent figures
(Breakwater Monitor, 2000) indicate that of a sample of 200 companies in the
year 2000, 9.52% of managers were African, 5.53% were Indian, 5.31% were
coloured and 79.64% were white. Of the total, 78.66% were male and 21.34%
were female. The relative power balance of ethnic groups within these sample
companies can be deduced if the managerial populations are compared with
the total representation of these four racial groupings within these organiza-
tions. These are 49.2% for Africans, 5.63% for Indians, 14.42% for coloured and
30.76% for whites: 72.07% are male and 27.93% are female. There still appears
to be considerable room for further redressing the power balances among the
racial groupings in corporations in South Africa.
Training courses in intercultural management and awareness sessions may
address issues of interaction. However, they may add very little directly to
addressing issues arising from the power imbalance within corporations which is
culturally related. They also do not address imbalances within the total stake-
holder population. Just looking at this statistically, the racial split in the population
of the Breakwater Monitor Report (2000) is fairly representative of the economi-
cally active population according to the 1999 Household Survey (although it
over-represents whites, and under-represents African females), yet this does not
reflect the total population (75.5% African, 2.5% Asian, 8.6% coloured and
13.1% white in the 1991 census). The number of Africans outside the economi-
cally active population indicates a disparity in power relations among the racial
groups in the total stakeholder community. This situation would be repeated
among emerging countries as different as India and Kazakstan.
Yet simply complying with the legislation is not sufficient in these
circumstances. Proactively managing across cultures would seem to be necessary
in order to redress some of the power imbalances not only by building aware-
ness, but also by developing general cross-cultural competences. Human (1996)
is critical of the maximalist approach (within South Africa, and elsewhere)
based on broad classification of cultures, such as Hofstede’s framework, as this
creates stereotypes. As these stereotypes are value-laden they have serious
implications for both the way in which individuals and groups perceive them-
selves and how others perceive them. They therefore acquire a self-fulfilling
nature. Previously these stereotypes led to perceptions about the inferiority of
black cultures from both blacks and whites. Human contends that more
recently perceptions have been created that African approaches are ‘nice’ and
that managers should be aiming to acquire more Africanized approaches. She
argues for a ‘minimalist’ position which ‘takes an interactional approach to
culture and argues that culture constitutes a subconscious part of a person’s
242 International Human Resource Management