An empirical investigation of host country national categorization of expatriates in the United Kingdom

In recent times, some authors have argued that Host Country National (HCN) categorization of expatriate co-workers plays a major role in expatriate adjustment. Previous studies have argued that HCN categorization of expatriates maybe be based on gender, or national origin. In this study, using data from 331 HCNs in the U.K., we find that HCN expectations of foreigners may play a big role in categorization. Further, we find that categorization leads to lower levels of support offered by HCNs, which can affect expatriate adjustment. We discuss implications and offer suggestions for future research.

Two-nation study of host country national categorization of female expatriates - United States and India

This study was designed to study the role of Host Country National categorizationof female expatriate co-workers, in two samples – U.S., and India. Using data from 54participants in the U.S. and 52 participants in India, we found that respondents from Indiacategorized potential expatriate co-workers from the U.S. into in-group or out-groupsignificantly more than respondents from the U.S. Further, we found that femaleexpatriates from the U.S. are preferred by Indian HCNs as co-workers significantly morethan male expatriates from the U.S. We discuss implications for organizations and offersuggestions for future research.

A new perspective on the female expatriate experience:the role of host country national categorization

This study was designed to investigate host country national (HCN) categorization of female expatriates, in two samples-U.S. and India. Two hundred and twenty-two HCNs (104 in the U.S. and 118 in India) participated in the study. Consistent with prior research [e.g., Tung, R. L. (1998). American expatriates abroad: From neophytes to cosmopolitans. Journal of World Business, 33: 125-140], we found that female expatriates from the U.S. were not discriminated against. Indeed, we found that female expatriates from the U.S. were preferred by Indian HCNs, as co-workers, significantly more than male expatriates from the U.S. We discuss implications for organizations and offer suggestions for future research. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Role of organizational identification, on Implicit Leadership Theories ILTs, transformational leadership and work attitudes

This investigation explores the effects of organizational identification on employees’ Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs) and the perception of leader behaviors. The study involved a cross-sectional survey of 439 employees from seven companies based in South Wales. Respondents completed two questionnaires that measured their organizational identification, ILTs, recognition of ILTs in their manager, manager’s leadership behaviors (transactional and transformational), and psychological reactions (job satisfaction, well-being, and turnover intentions). The level of organizational identification did not affect the prototype of an ideal work-based leader. However, high organizational identification was associated with more positive ratings on the actual manager, the extent to which their manager displayed transactional and transformational behaviors, and with more positive psychological reactions to work. Employees high in organizational identification based their judgments of their leader’s transactional and transformational behaviors on the extent to which they recognized their leader as possessing leadership traits. However, those low on organizational identification allowed their prototype of their ideal leader to bias their judgment of their actual leader’s behavior. Finally, there was partial support for the augmenting hypothesis (that tranformational leadership would predict additional variance in psychological outcomes above that predicted by transactional leadership) for those high in organizational identification but not for those low in organizational identification.

Workplace gender discrimination and the implicit association test

Women are under-represented at senior levels within organisations. They also fareless well than their male counterparts in reward and career opportunities. Attitudestoward women in the workplace are thought to underpin these disparities and moreand more organisations are introducing attitude measures into diversity and inclusioninitiatives to: 1) raise awareness amongst employees of implicit attitudes, 2) educateemployees on how these attitudes can influence behaviour and 3) re-measure theattitude after an intervention to assess whether the attitude has changed. TheImplicit Association Test (IAT: Greenwald, et al., 1998) is the most popular tool usedto assess attitudes. However, questions over the predictive validity of the measurehave been raised and the evidence for the real world impact of the implicit attitudes islimited (Blanton et al., 2009; Landy, 2008; Tetlock & Mitchell, 2009; Wax, 2010).Whilst there is growing research in the area of race, little research has explored theability of the IAT to predict gender discrimination. This thesis addresses thisimportant gap in the literature. Three empirical studies were conducted. The firststudy explored whether gender IATs were predictive of personnel decisions thatfavour men and whether affect- and cognition-based gender IATs were equallypredictive of behaviour. The second two studies explored the predictive validity ofthe IAT in comparison to an explicit measure of one type of gender attitude,benevolent sexism. The results revealed implicit gender attitudes were stronglyheld. However, they did not consistently predict behaviour across the studies.Overall, the results suggest that the IAT may only predict workplace genderdiscrimination in a very select set of circumstances. The attitude component that anIAT assesses, the personnel decision and participant demographics all impact thepredictive validity of the tool. The interplay between the IAT and behaviour thereforeappears to be more complex than is assumed.

Implicit leadership theories in applied settings:factor structure, generalizability, and stability over time

The present empirical investigation had a 3-fold purpose: (a) to cross-validate L. R. Offermann, J. K. Kennedy, and P. W. Wirtz's (1994) scale of Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs) in several organizational settings and to further provide a shorter scale of ILTs in organizations; (b) to assess the generalizability of ILTs across different employee groups, and (c) to evaluate ILTs' change over time. Two independent samples were used for the scale validation (N 1 = 500 and N 2 = 439). A 6-factor structure (Sensitivity, Intelligence, Dedication, Dynamism, Tyranny, and Masculinity) was found to most accurately represent ILTs in organizational settings. Regarding the generalizability of ILTs, although the 6-factor structure was consistent across different employee groups, there was only partial support for total factorial invariance. Finally, evaluation of gamma, beta, and alpha change provided support for ILTs' stability over time.

The effective use of implicit parallelism through the use of an object-oriented programming language

This thesis explores translating well-written sequential programs in a subset of the Eiffel programming language - without syntactic or semantic extensions - into parallelised programs for execution on a distributed architecture. The main focus is on constructing two object-oriented models: a theoretical self-contained model of concurrency which enables a simplified second model for implementing the compiling process. There is a further presentation of principles that, if followed, maximise the potential levels of parallelism. Model of Concurrency. The concurrency model is designed to be a straightforward target for mapping sequential programs onto, thus making them parallel. It aids the compilation process by providing a high level of abstraction, including a useful model of parallel behaviour which enables easy incorporation of message interchange, locking, and synchronization of objects. Further, the model is sufficient such that a compiler can and has been practically built. Model of Compilation. The compilation-model's structure is based upon an object-oriented view of grammar descriptions and capitalises on both a recursive-descent style of processing and abstract syntax trees to perform the parsing. A composite-object view with an attribute grammar style of processing is used to extract sufficient semantic information for the parallelisation (i.e. code-generation) phase. Programming Principles. The set of principles presented are based upon information hiding, sharing and containment of objects and the dividing up of methods on the basis of a command/query division. When followed, the level of potential parallelism within the presented concurrency model is maximised. Further, these principles naturally arise from good programming practice. Summary. In summary this thesis shows that it is possible to compile well-written programs, written in a subset of Eiffel, into parallel programs without any syntactic additions or semantic alterations to Eiffel: i.e. no parallel primitives are added, and the parallel program is modelled to execute with equivalent semantics to the sequential version. If the programming principles are followed, a parallelised program achieves the maximum level of potential parallelisation within the concurrency model.

Antecedents and consequences of the social categorization of expatriates in India

Multinational organizations have dramatically increased their operations in Asian countries in recent years. The success of expatriate assignments has therefore become increasingly important for multinationals. Social and cultural psychologists have proposed that host country nationals' (HCN) attitudes toward expatriates are key antecedents of interpersonally supportive behavior related to assignment success. We developed and tested a model of HCN social categorization and helping of expatriates based on the social–psychological theory. Results indicated that perceived values similarity and collectivism are negatively related to social categorization of expatriates, and that social categorization is negatively related to the provision of role information and social support by HCNs. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for theory and for organizations sending expatriates to culturally dissimilar host countries.

An investigation into the nature and consequences of teachers' implicit philosophies of science

The aims of this study were to investigate the beliefs concerning the philosophy of science held by practising science teachers and to relate those beliefs to their pupils' understanding of the philosophy of science. Three philosophies of science, differing in the way they relate experimental work to other parts of the scientific enterprise, are described. By the use of questionnaire techniques, teachers of four extreme types were identified. These are: the H type or hypothetico-deductivist teacher, who sees experiments as potential falsifiers of hypotheses or of logical deductions from them; the I type or inductivist teacher, who regards experiments mainly as a way of increasing the range of observations available for recording before patterns are noted and inductive generalisation is carried out; the V type or verificationist teacher, who expects experiments to provide proof and to demonstrate the truth or accuracy of scientific statements; and the 0 type, who has no discernible philosophical beliefs about the nature of science or its methodology. Following interviews of selected teachers to check their responses to the questionnaire and to determine their normal teaching methods, an experiment was organised in which parallel groups were given H, I and V type teaching in the normal school situation during most of one academic year. Using pre-test and post-test scores on a specially developed test of pupil understanding of the philosophy of science, it was shown that pupils were positively affected by their teacher's implied philosophy of science. There was also some indication that V type teaching improved marks obtained in school science examinations, but appeared to discourage the more able from continuing the study of science. Effects were also noted on vocabulary used by pupils to describe scientists and their activities.

From ideal to real:a longitudinal study of the role of implicit leadership theories on leader-member exchanges and employee outcomes

The results of the present longitudinal study demonstrate the importance of implicit leadership theories (ILTs) for the quality of leader-member exchanges (LMX) and employees' organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and well-being. Results based on a sample of 439 employees who completed the study questionnaires at 2 time points showed that the closer employees perceived their actual manager's profile to be to the ILTs they endorsed, the better the quality of LMX. Results also indicated that the implicit-explicit leadership traits difference had indirect effects on employee attitudes and well-being. These findings were consistent across employee groups that differed in terms of job demand and the duration of manager-employee relation, but not in terms of motivation. Furthermore, crossed-lagged modeling analyses of the longitudinal data explored the possibility of reciprocal effects between implicit-explicit leadership traits difference and LMX and provided support for the initially hypothesized direction of causal effects.

Measurement of implicit leadership theories and their effect on leadership processes and outcomes

The leadership categorisation theory suggests that followers rely on a hierarchical cognitive structure in perceiving leaders and the leadership process, which consists of three levels; superordinate, basic and subordinate. The predominant view is that followers rely on Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs) at the basic level in making judgments about managers. The thesis examines whether this presumption is true by proposing and testing two competing conceptualisations; namely the congruence between the basic level ILTs (general leader) and actual manager perceptions, and subordinate level ILTs (job-specific leader) and actual manager. The conceptualisation at the job-specific level builds on context-related assertions of the ILT explanatory models: leadership categorisation, information processing and connectionist network theories. Further, the thesis addresses the effects of ILT congruence at the group level. The hypothesised model suggests that Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) will act as a mediator between ILT congruence and outcomes. Three studies examined the proposed model. The first was cross-sectional with 175 students reporting on work experience during a 1-year industrial placement. The second was longitudinal and had a sample of 343 students engaging in a business simulation in groups with formal leadership. The final study was a cross-sectional survey in several organisations with a sample of 178. A novel approach was taken to congruence analysis; the hypothesised models were tested using Latent Congruence Modelling (LCM), which accounts for measurement error and overcomes the majority of limitations of traditional approaches. The first two studies confirm the traditional theorised view that employees rely on basic-level ILTs in making judgments about their managers with important implications, and show that LMX mediates the relationship between ILT congruence and work-related outcomes (performance, job satisfaction, well-being, task satisfaction, intragroup conflict, group satisfaction, team realness, team-member exchange, group performance). The third study confirms this with conflict, well-being, self-rated performance and commitment as outcomes.

Minority influence and social categorization:a replication

The effects of ingroup and outgroup minorities upon public and private levels of influence was examined. The results show that whilst ingroup minorities have greater influence in public, outgroup minorities can have as much, if not more influence than ingroup minorities when responses are made in private. These results are consistent with previous research and support the social identijkation model of social influence.