| Given the diverse, changing work force in the United States--made up of not only baby-boomers and increasing numbers of women, but also a large number of multicultural immigrants--there appears to be a need to investigate how employees and managers are managing the cultural diversity that exists in their work intercultural interactions.; This study assesses respondents' critical incident experiences with cultural differences--ethnic, age, gender, along 12 job categories and across 14 departments of one hospital site in Southern California. Data was collected through interviews with 34 participants--15 managers and 19 employees. Interview questions focused on typical, positive, and negative intercultural interactions. Additional questions related to perceived advantages and disadvantages of cultural diversity, knowledge of others who are different, work ethic, challenge to authority, and recognition.; Supplementing the interview methodology, Schwartz's Values Questionnaire, reveals that respondents value benevolence as their most important value and depict this value in their interview accounts.; Five prominent themes appear recurrently in the participants' incident accounts: Attitude, including the subthemes of prejudice, people's intense feelings and behaviors, and attitude tolerance; Group Differences, including the subthemes of cultural, gender, age, collective orientation vs. self-orientation; Adaptation, including the subthemes of unassertive behavior, assertive behavior, and adjusting behavior; Work, including the subthemes of work related issues, management related issues, and authority relations; and Communication Effectiveness, including the subthemes of linguistic competence and comprehension/understanding.; A change model is developed for multicultural collaboration in the work place. The five-phase process includes diagnosis (theme data collection), analysis (human resource theories), client feedback, interventions, and evaluation. Specific interventions are identified for the five different theme areas along with criteria for evaluating change. Various theoretical concepts are identified which can provide a means for understanding the themes from a human resource perspective.; This study concludes that cultural diversity definitely impacts the hospital work place, and that there is the potential to take a culturally diverse environment and foster actions which will transition it to a multiculturally collaborative one.; Further research is identified in such areas as: longitudinal studies of the work place acculturation process, studies on the effectiveness of work systems with multicultural employees, and research on immigrant authority relations. |
