PDW submission #11113 titled "Effective member interactions across cultures"
Sponsoring committee: The Diversion and Inclusion Theme Committee
Date: Friday, August 07, 2015 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM (Pacific Time)
Location: Pan Pacific Coal Harbour in the Coal Harbour Suite
Pre-registration: For pre-registration, kindly send an email to payalk1@gmail.com by 28th July, 2015 or register on
Workshop facilitators:
An international team consisting of:
Payal Kumar, Glocal University, India (Chair)
Tom Verghese, Director, Cultural Synergies, Australia
Stacy Blake-Beard, Simmons College, USA
The theme of the PDW:
This workshop aims to challenge one’s conscious and unconscious biases. Studies have found that while unconscious bias is widely prevalent, individuals can decrease their unconscious biases with certain interventions (Lee, 2005).We propose this workshop as one such intervention in order to facilitate effective interactions across cultures, especially in view of a feeling of disenchantment and perception of exclusion amongst many of the international members of the Academy.
The Academy of Management (AOM) is growing in both size and in diversity of membership identity (in 2013, the composition was 53% US/47% other nations). This internationalization of membership is the biggest driver of the AOM’s growth. Yet it is important to note that the 2013 survey of inclusion findings revealed that one-fifth of international respondents reported feeling excluded, with US-centrism cited as a recurring reason. It is possible that facilitators of workshops and other sessions at the AOM are falling into a pattern of unconscious bias, in other words an unconscious affinity for people who look alike, think alike and who come from a similar background (Gladwell & Ruiter, 2008).
This workshop not only furthers the Academy’s vision, but is also salient to the theme of the 2015 conference: “The theme of the 2015 conference, Opening Governance, invites members to consider opportunities to improve the effectiveness and creativity of organizations by restructuring systems at the highest organizational levels … Organizations will be compelled to confront the interests of stakeholders in their most important information assets and, at the same time, only be able to develop and use these assets through collaboration and partnership” (http://aom.org/annualmeeting/2015/theme/). The AOM leadership will benefit from taking an opportunity to increase its response time as an organization undergoing extraordinary transformation, to the increasing internationalization of its membership - its stakeholders (including those nominated to positions of leadership). Identifying and addressing conscious and unconscious bias is a powerful tool to support effective member interaction across cultures within the Academy.
Pre-registration for Participants
Workshop participants will be asked to read an article on unconscious bias; we are also requesting that participants take an Implicit Association Test (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html). For pre-registration, kindly send an email to payalk1@gmail.com by 28th July, 2015.
References
Gladwell, M., & Ruiter, M. E. (2008). Blink: The power of thinking without thinking. Gedragstherapie, 41(2), 199.
Lee, A. J. (2005). Unconscious bias theory in employment discrimination litigation. Harv. CR-CLL Rev., 40, 481.