Multicultural workplaces and manager tolerance for ambiguity in global organizations

¶ … Tolerance of Ambiguity and Corporate Success in Global and Ethically-Diverse Organizations: An Initial Study

Frenkel-Brunswick (as cited in Kruglanski, 2004) first defined the trait ambiguity tolerance (AT) as a personalty variable that is primarily influential in the formation of social relationships within a diverse context. As the polar opposite of ambiguity intolerance, tolerance of ambiguity is highly correlated with personality-derived behaviours that are open to different cultural mindsets and experiences (Feist and Feist, 2003). Kruglanski (2004) had pointed out that this particular construct has been used in the context of decisive and risk-taking behavior in organization, more prominently in the personality characteristics of entrepreneurship, but there is little literature that specifically studies the linkages between success on the corporate ladder and the level of ambiguity tolerance in the context of multicultural organizations. Simply said, does having a higher tolerance for ambiguity increase the probability of a promotion in such a setting? This study serves to fill this knowledge gap.

Theoretical framework: The study will be guided by the general ideas formulated in Furnham and Ribchester (1995) that explored the main threads of constructs surrounding the AT framework. More specifically, the study will involve the derivation of correlational relationships between AT and promotional organizational behavior, i.e. relationships between corporate rank and ratings on the AT scale. Since it is assumed that an ethnically-diverse company would probably include the entrance of employees with high AT in its ranks, then this is a sound objective for the scope of the study.

In this case, the following hypotheses are proposed:

H0: Employees in an ethnically diverse company who have high AT scores will not have a history of promotion.

H1: Employees in an ethnically diverse company who have high AT scores will have a history of promotion.

Method

Participants will be recruited from a soon-to-be chosen global and ethnically diverse organization controlling for the number of years the participants had been loyal to the company. Each participant will be given an AT personality measure that serves to establish his current level of tolerance of ambiguity. After the said psychometric test, a survey meant to gather the details of their organizational behaviour will be given. Full disclosure as to the purpose of the study will be given after all the evaluation tasks. For the analysis, relationships between corporate rank and AT rating will be evaluated as well as other organizational behaviour after establishing if there are significant differences in the AT scale ratings of the participants.