People may hold different understandings of race that might affect how they respond to the culture of groups deemed to be racially distinct. The present research tests how this process is moderated by the minority individual's lay theory of race. An essentialist lay theory of race (i.e., that race reflects deep-seated, inalterable essence and is indicative of traits and ability) would orient racial minorities to rigidly adhere to their ethnic culture, whereas a social constructionist lay theory of race (i.e., that race is socially constructed, malleable, and arbitrary) would orient racial minorities to identify and cognitively assimilate toward the majority culture. To test these predictions, the authors conducted 4 studies with Asian American participants. The first 2 studies examine the effect of one's lay theory of race on perceived racial differences and identification with American culture. The last 2 studies tested the moderating effect of lay theory of race on identification and assimilation toward the majority American culture after this culture had been primed. The results generally supported the prediction that the social constructionist theory was associated with more perceived similarity between Asians and Americans and more consistent identification and assimilation toward American culture, compared with the essentialist theory.
Three studies support the proposal that need for closure (NFC) involves a desire for consensual validation that leads to cultural conformity. Individual differences in NFC interact with cultural group variables to determine East Asian versus Western differences in conflict style and procedural preferences (Study 1), information gathering in disputes (Study 2), and fairness judgment in reward allocations (Study 3). Results from experimental tests indicate that the relevance of NFC to cultural conformity reflects consensus motives rather than effort minimization (Study 2) or political conservatism (Study 3). Implications for research on conflict resolution and motivated cultural cognition are discussed.
Previous studies have established the relationship between ethical leadership and a variety of positive follower outcomes. They have investigated a number of psychological mechanisms that mediate these relationships. In terms of mediators, follower organizational identification has been found to mediate the relationship between ethical leadership and follower job performance. In this research, we incorporate a second distinct and theoretically important type of social identification process, relational identification with the leader, along with organizational identification, and examine their mediating effects on follower performance and voice outcomes. Further, we bring the implicit theory of morality to the behavioral ethics literature and examine follower morality beliefs as a moderator. Using a Romanian sample of 302 followers under the supervision of 27 leaders, we found that ethical leadership has an indirect effect on follower job performance and voice (through the mediating mechanisms of both organizational and relational identifications) and that these relationships are stronger for followers who held the implicit theory that a person's moral character is fixed. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.Keywords: Ethical leadership; relational identification; organizational identification; voice; implicit theory of morality (Mayer et al., 2012;Stouten et al., 2010). Recently, more attention has been paid to understanding the mediating mechanisms that underlie these relationships. The ethical leadership construct was initially proposed to rely on social learning processes to produce its effects (Brown et al., 2005). More recently, researchers have emphasized the prominent role of social identification processes by focusing on organizational identification as a mediator . We propose a model that includes two types of social identification mechanisms as mediators and that proposes a moderator of these effects that is new to the behavioral ethics literature, implicit morality beliefs.Identification processes have previously been proposed as a potential mediating mechanism (e.g., Brown & Mitchell, 2010) in the ethical leadership/outcome relationship . We expand the prior exclusive focus on organizational identification to account for the likely important role played by an employee's relational identification with the leader. Relational identification represents the extent to which one defines oneself in terms of a given role-relationship (Sluss & Ashforth, 2007), in this case, Perhaps more importantly, we propose that these identification processes will operate differently for employees holding different implicit morality beliefs. Individuals hold and utilize different implicit theories to make sense of the social world (Gopnik & Wellman, 1994;Kelly, 1955). These beliefs represent unspoken assumptions that can influence how people understand and structure their experiences. Although the implicit theory of managers has been shown to influence procedural justice and performance appraisal of...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.