Immigrants and Cultural Adaptation in the American Workplace

Today''s managers must deal with a wide variety of employee differences in ethnic backgrounds, values, lifestyles, and needs. This book presents a model of employee acculturation, investigating how Muslim employees adapt to U.S. national and organizational cultures The study investigates the relationships between respondents'' acculturation patterns, their degree of religiosity, degree of collective or individual orientation, the extent of perceived discrepancies between their original cultures and U.S. organizational culture, and their national origin, examining demographic variables such as age, gender, education, occupation, and number of years lived and worked in the U.S Responses from 339 Muslims revealed that most were inclined to retain their original culture rather than adopting U.S. national culture. In contrast, most accepted U.S. organizational cultures. The analysis of the practical implications of these findings for business management highlights a number of practical strategies for coping with an increasingly multicultural workforce (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Mississippi, 1993; revised with new preface, and index)