Agency and coping strategies for ethnic and gendered minorities at work

Abstract

This study examines the comparative workplace experiences of twenty Muslim professional women from the United Kingdom and Australia classified as minorities in terms of their ethnic, religious, gender and migration status. Diversity as exclusion remains highly topical in extant diversity studies. For instance, Muslim migrants have often been stereotyped as sexually constrained, victimized, ignorant, poor, uneducated and tradition-bound. Muslim women may be highly discouraged if western workplaces are not conducive to social and cultural needs. By using human agency and coping theory, the study investigates the coping strategies of Muslim professional women, how they adapt, how they react and reflect on stressful workplace events such as discriminatory behaviour. Agency theory provides a basis by which to explore agent responses to organisational narratives in this study. Overall, the study finds that active coping and planning to deal with stressful events is important to ethnic minorities and that emotion-focused coping is used when less active planning is prevalent. The study lends support to the triple jeopardy effects of race-related ethnicity, work practices and gender. The findings pose challenges for Western feminist theory in terms of the interface between gender and religion and the freedom of expression of individual agents in the workplace.

The Human Coping Process in the Context of Organizational Change

“…The positive psychology movement refers to this capacity as human resilience (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000;Paludo & Koller, 2007). It involves protective factors (coping and buffer strategies) used by an individual to deal with risk factors (Garmezy, 1985;Barlach & Malvezzi, 2010;Reppold, Mayer, Almeida & Hutz, 2012;Bendassolli, Coelho-Lima, Carlotto, Nussle & Ferreira, 2015;Zheng, Kashi, Fan, Molineux & Ee, 2015;Murray & Ali, 2017).…”

“…The interface between organizational change processes and its effects on employees' has called the attention of many relevant works conducted in the psychosocial arena (Lazarus & Folk man, 1984;Cox, Griffiths & Rail-Gonzalez, 2000;Simmer, 2003;Landsbergis, Schnall, Belkic, Baker, Schwartz & Pickering, 2011, among others). At the same time, there is a need to further study the impact of stress psychosocial risk factors in changing workplaces on employees (Bendassolli, Coelho-Lima, Carlotto, Nussle & Ferreira, 2015;Murray & Ali, 2017;Oliveira, Cavazotte & Dunzer, 2017).…”

“…Insecurity begins to dominate the psychosocial health of workers in changing workplaces (Bendassolli, Coelho-Lima, Carlotto, Nussle & Ferreira, 2015), and risk elements spur an emotional imbalance within workers, as risks become feared, as given situation may negatively affect their lives (Bhamra, Dani & Burnard, 2011). For this reason, risk factors and psychosocial stress related to the workplace affect not only an organization's outcomes but also all individuals within such contexts (Landsbergis, Schnall, Belkic, Baker, Schwartz & Pickering, 2011;Bendassolli, Coelho-Lima, Carlotto, Nussle & Ferreira, 2015;Zheng, Kashi, Fan, Molineux & Ee, 2015;Murray & Ali, 2017).…”

“…The organizational change process has created space in the academic literature to discuss their effects on individual employees (Ramlall, 2009;Bendassolli, Coelho-Lima, Carlotto, Nussle & Ferreira, 2015;Murray & Ali, 2017), drawing attention to the fact that professionals face difficult circumstances in their workplaces and sometimes resort to protection factors (coping and buffer strategies) to combat the effects of organizational change on their lives (Cicchetti, 2010). The positive psychology movement classifies this behavior as human resilience (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984;Garmezy, 1985;Bendassolli, Coelho-Lima, Carlotto, Nussle & Ferreira, 2015).…”

Género y management en el marco neoliberal. Un análisis crítico para la emergencia de liderazgos feministas

“…Se trata de una realidad que coharta la emergencia de las identidades de las mujeres en la empresa, pero también de muchos otros grupos que ocupan una posición de desventaja en las redes de poder (Murray y Ali 2017). Por tanto, se acaban por legitimar y perpetuar los mismos liderazgos de siempre (tradicionalmente masculinos) y los mismos grupos que ocupan las posiciones de poder.…”