Diversity attitudes and sensitivity of employees and leaders in the German STEM-sector.

The increasing diversity of cultural backgrounds, migration status and age is shaping modern working life. Previous research demonstrated that the attitudes and competences of team members and leaders toward diversity play a crucial role in utilizing the potential of heterogeneous teams and preventing detrimental behavior and discrimination. But even though leaders appear to be key figures in the process of diversity management, their perception of diversity as well as related challenges and chances are poorly investigated. The current paper aims to contribute to the understanding of leaders' perspective on and role in diversity management building on a comparative analysis of two explorative qualitative studies with 16 employees and 22 leaders. The overall research questions are how employees and leaders perceive diversity of culture and age from their specific point of view, which experiences are likely to contribute to their opinion on and perception of diversity and in how far do employees and leaders differ in these aspects. Participants come from the German sector of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), which is the most internationalized and least psychologically investigated sector in Germany. The results show that employees are aware of the topic of diversity in general but have poor competences in dealing with diversity in their daily work life. This seems to be associated with a lack of experience with intercultural interaction and a lack of support from the respective organizations/leaders. We further found that individuals with a migration background do not show any signs of stereotype threat rather than expressing a feeling of being isolated from employees without a migration background. By comparing perspectives of leaders and employees, the current study contributes to the understanding of the processes underlying the experiences of inequalities of migrants and experiences of intercultural miscommunication and faultlines of people without migration background. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

A comparative study on culture-specific and cross-cultural aspects of intercultural relations in Hungary, Serbia, Czech Republic, and Germany.

The ability, will, and belief that it is possible to deal effectively with members of other cultural/ethnic groups are still gaining importance all over the world. However, the majority of studies on intercultural relations focus on Western Europe and the USA, applying constructs and theories that replicate a western-centered worldview. As a consequence, it is unclear whether established measures for intergroup attitudes and intercultural competence may be applied in Eastern European countries and to what extent they display comparable ideas, thoughts, and feelings. The current study thus explores cross-cultural commonalities and differences in established measures of ethnic identity, prejudice, acculturation strategies, intercultural intelligence, and multicultural personality. Therefore, we compare the scale structure, difficulty, and sensitivity in samples from Germany and the Eastern European countries Hungary, Serbia, and the Czech Republic (etic-perspective), as well as the culture-specific conceptions of said concepts (emic-perspective). Results show that the investigated scales do not work comparably across German and Eastern European samples. Differences might be rooted in variations of underlying thinking patterns and connotations of single expressions. Those variations are likely to be related to the constant individual societal and historical developments of cultures, shaping the way individuals think and talk about cultural diversity. Future studies are encouraged to consider culture-specific and generalizable aspects of constructs when conducting cross-cultural research on intercultural relations.

Scale Characteristics of Intercultural Competence Measures and the Effects of Intercultural Competence on Prejudice.

Due to proceeding globalization processes, involving a rise in mobility and international interdependencies, the frequency and relevance of intercultural contact situations increases. Consequently, the ability to deal effectively with intercultural situations is gaining in importance. However, the majority of studies on measures of intercultural competence focuses on Western Europe and the United States or cultures of the Far East. For the present study, previously understudied Eastern European (former communist) cultures were included, by sampling in Hungary, Serbia, and the Czech Republic, in addition to (the Central or Western European country) Germany. Thus, this study enabled comparisons of scale characteristics of the cultural intelligence scale (CQS), the multicultural personality questionnaire (MPQ), as well as the blatant and subtle prejudice scales, across samples from different cultures. It was also examined how the CQS and MPQ dimensions are associated with prejudice. To analyse scale characteristics, the factor structures and measurement invariances of the used instruments were analyzed. There were violations of configural measurement invariance observed for all of these scales, indicating that the comparability across samples is limited. Therefore, each of the samples was analyzed separately when examining how the CQS and MPQ dimensions are related to prejudice. It was revealed that, in particular, the motivational aspect of the CQS was statistically predicting lower prejudice. Less consistently, the MPQ dimensions of open-mindedness and flexibility were statistically predicting lower prejudice in some of the analyses. However, the violations of measurement invariance indicate differences in the constructs' meanings across the samples from different cultures. It is consequently argued that cross-cultural equivalence should not be taken for granted when comparing Eastern and Western European cultures.