Minding the Gap: How Perspective-Taking and Status Reflexivity Help Black Women Executives to Relate Across Difference at Work

Workplace relationships are a necessary and critical component of being able to perform one’s job and advance in one’s career. The personal and professional resources required for navigating relationships with dissimilar work colleagues can be particularly costly for those in minority groups who are most often different from their relational partners. Drawing from interviews conducted with Black women executives, we examined how these women experience relational triggers that emphasize their differences from others because of their limited numbers at their level. Our findings indicate that Black women executives respond to these relational triggers by engaging in perspective-taking and status reflexivity to understand others’, and their own, perspectives on the identity and status differentials present in the interaction. Through an introspective process, these women assess and address gaps in how they believe their partners see them and how they see themselves, which prompts them to either reduce or maintain perceived gaps depending on the importance of the interaction partner. We also explore how reducing or maintaining the perceived gap ultimately influences how Black women think, feel, or behave toward their relational partner (i.e., relational valence) in ways that may shape how they interpret future interactions. This study advances workplace relationships research by integrating intersectionality literature and by considering how minority perspective-taking and status reflexivity can be useful in navigating relationships across difference.