This study aims to examine why leadership legitimacy remains fragile for South African Black women leaders despite increased representation in senior and executive roles. Existing research has focused on access, advancement and representation, leaving under-examined how legitimacy is evaluated and withdrawn after appointment. This study frames leadership legitimacy as a process governed through ongoing evaluation shaped by historically sedimented power relations.
This study adopts a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, drawing on semi-structured interviews with 25 South African Black women in senior leadership positions. Interviews explored leadership trajectories, evaluative encounters and moments of recognition and contestation. Data were analysed through an iterative interpretive process informed by Gadamerian hermeneutics, tracing how organisational memory, path dependency and evaluative regimes structure legitimacy over time.
Legitimacy remains conditional and reversible, sustained through permanent evaluation; tenure and performance do not secure consolidation. Participants described heightened scrutiny, shifting thresholds and recurrent challenges to authority, particularly in high-stakes contexts. This study identifies shielding labour as a central empirical pattern: a compelled form of work through which leaders anticipate, absorb and neutralise racialised, gendered and classed deficit assumptions to sustain credibility.
This study frames leadership legitimacy as a temporally governed and institutionally produced process rather than an individual achievement. By foregrounding permanent evaluation as an organising principle of authority, the study extends inequality regime theory by showing how unequal distributions of legitimacy work are reproduced after formal inclusion. The authors redirect attention from individual performance to organisational conditions through which authority remains conditional, reversible and unevenly sustained.
