“Mr. Company”: White Managers, Black Voices Revisited in Post Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Many human resources managers and others have dealt with changing worker motivations and declining productivity amidst change. However, when dramatic socio‐political events occur in a culture or globally, they often bring on new hopes and expectations for workers which may or may not be fully understood by ‘Mr. Company’, a patriarchal moniker South African workers often use when talking about the management of their employing company. South Africa's blue‐collar workers before and after apartheid are an example of the need to more frequently examine the impact of change on worker attitudes and of the perception of that change by management. This study revisits South Africa after apartheid to survey a sample of black workers and their white supervisors from three mining operations for changes in their attitudes since a baseline study performed by Harari & Beaty in the mid 1980's. The implications, to Mr. ‘Company's’ human resource managers and managers of other multinational enterprises, of these dramatic changes and resultant rise in workers' expectations are examined in light of the new, Nelson Mandela and African National Congress led, South African government's recommendations for enhancing black quality of life, involvement, and development.