Person-Environment Fit in Ghanaian Banks - The impact of *, age, ethnical origin, personality similarity and workgroup diversity on interpersonal relations and performance
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Diplomarbeit aus dem Jahr 2008 im Fachbereich Kulturwissenschaften - Sonstiges, Note: 1,0, Universität Leipzig (Biowissenschaften, Pharmazie, Psychologie, Sozialpsychologie), Sprache: Englisch, Inhaltsangabe:Introduction:The present study is a blend of three different streams of psychology – cross-cultural, organizational and social psychology. It mixes cross-cultural ingredients about the context - the country Ghana and the continent Africa - with theories about the relevance of social categories in team building processes and spices from I/O psychology – dyadic leader-member exchange and relationship quality, group performance and the inner country context of banks. All to find an answer to the overarching question: Do social categories, more precisely their similarity in dyads or their fit between an individual and his or her workgroup, affect interpersonal relationship and group outcomes such as attitudes or performance in the banking system of the transitional economy Ghana?Much has been written on the African way of life, thought and organization, but most of this work is restricted to ethnological knowledge which does not offer a robust theoretical basis, on which a psychological study can be built. The last years saw Africa ranking highest on development aid agendas like the Millennium Development Goals announced by the United Nations because most of the African countries, especially south of the Sahara, have been left behind by the development taking place in most parts of the underdeveloped world within the last fifty years. Many explanations have been attempted, but only a small volume of elaborate research has been undertaken. Often the traditional organization of individuals in clan like micro communities with their own chief and priest and so their own judicial, legislative and executive system is blamed together with a recent history of colonialism, creating country bodies without any historical eligibility and immense ethnic rivalry within and between them. This would have led to a tradition of favoritism and corruption along former and new lines of public organization. These claims are mostly made without empirical evidence and most likely oversimplify state of affairs where a closer look would be necessary. Often, these claims tend to explain the present exclusively by the past, concealing that by now there is a unique present state that might be explained by history as a necessary but not sufficient condition, as a heuristic story for today. Moreover, the thin ice crust of sound empirical studies available on African countries is over-generalized to the total territorial body of Sub-Saharan Africa, ignoring the immense diversity in this part of the world. Finally, most of the conducted studies incorporate western instruments without proven ecological validity, and arrive at conclusions about underlying constructs although the instruments show poor factor structures or internal consistencies. After presenting some of these shortcomings in current research on Africa, the present study attempts to overcome at least some of these limitations. It focuses exclusively on Ghana and does not claim African universality. Still, the intra-Ghanaian context of the present study consists of organizational bodies that are found without large structural differences everywhere in the world – banks – and so allows for principle comparability of the results and highest possible content validity for the used western instruments. Banks are plausibly among the most modern of all organizations within the country, concerning human resource management, leadership and organizational structure, and so make up the perfect contrast foil for finding cultural peculiarities, guiding behavior in a transitional economy entrenched between the future and the past. This approach allows conclusions about which social categories will have to be handled with care in team building in future organizations to come when the development process progresses further. The validity problem was addressed through a preparatory qualitative study, using the repertory grid technique, which created items for the questionnaire used in the subsequent quantitative study. Moreover, the western instruments like LMX were validated in Ghana for the first time.The structure of this thesis reflects the problems faced during the literature review, data collection and data analysis. Most of them were clearly attributable to the context, Ghana, an African country, e.g.: the scarcity of literature in general; methodological flaws of either poor study design in studies conducted by Africans or little knowledge of context and culture, leading to wrong conclusions, in western studies; a high acquiescence bias, resulting in low differentiation and a meaningless overlap of variance; item wording that led to comprehensibility problems, mostly accounted for by western questionnaires. Most of these problems are reflected on in section 1.1 `The context: Ghana in Africa´, which can be understood as a preface, necessary for everyone new to psychological research on the African continent. Relevant psychological research considering Ghana is very sparse, so the superordinate entity – Africa – was examined. The section starts with a critique on the scientific treatment of Africa and might also be interesting for Africa veterans. In searching information about Ghana in Africa, it became clear that a psychological `Africa´ construct is the first faulty assumption when conducting research on this continent. Subsequently, the Ghanaian context is described in terms of history, ethnical composition and gender issues, and the few relevant studies that included Ghanaian samples are laid out - quite a colorful collage, ranging from cross-cultural to gender studies.After these first two sections, the core theory of this thesis is derived from social and organizational psychology, subsumed under the person-environment fit agenda, incorporating relational demography and workgroup diversity. There have been no studies in Ghana, not even in Sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa as a special case in many respects), at least none the author is aware of, which could be sorted under these headings. So after being pitched into Sub-Saharan Africa, the reader is suddenly surrounded by the psychological realities of Mexicans or Hong Kongese, while most of the presented research was conducted in the US. It might feel strange to find Africa or Ghana only rarely mentioned, but the previous sections already warned about invalid conclusions. The present study tries to combine two worlds, the African and the Western philosophy, the ethnological and the psychological method, the cross-cultural and the within-culture perspective. If these worlds would be the same, there would be no need for further research. The logic of compromise, of fitting things that appear not to fit, is pivotal for the present work, and its central methodological problem.Section 1.3 provides theoretical information and empirical evidence concerning the instruments used in the study for measuring performance, leader-member exchange and the work related attitudes affective commitment and job satisfaction. Section 1.4 describes philosophical fundamentals of constructivism, a useful framework for approaching cultural differences in general and the theoretical background for the repertory grid technique, used for developing an instrument to measure dyadic relationship quality with a Ghanaian item bias. Chapter 1 concludes with a summary and hypotheses.The second chapter – methods – describes the two conducted studies, the qualitative preliminary and the quantitative main study, which had overlapping but not similar samples. The qualitative analysis is not presented in much detail, although it might be one of the most interesting parts, as it describes the construed reality of dyadic leader-follower work relations in Ghana. Instead the focus is on the generation of items for the second quantitative part. There, construct validity was a central issue; all scales were analyzed using internal consistencies, exploratory and more conservative confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The CFA results are depicted graphically to convey a feeling for the data structure. It is believed that an in-depth analysis of the scales is necessary for conducting any further computations. This analysis led to the omission of some scales and frustration about the apparent one-dimensionality of the newborn leader-follower relationship quality questionnaire, which even so overlapped with the western instrument for leader-member exchange quality assessment.Results were computed using state of the art multilevel analysis, an approach only rarely found in person-environment fit research, although it gains more and more popularity. Its appeal lies in the partitioning of variance if data is nested. In the present study followers were nested in workgroups with one leader. This procedure is explained in detail in section two of the results chapter; for theoretical basics see e.g. Bryk and Raudenbush. The statistical handling of person-supervisor fit is quite unique and was not found in the previous literature, most likely because it is not at all trivial. Most of the significant results are interactions and depicted graphically to support comprehensibility.This thesis is long, and it took a long time to write it. Its length is due to handling the context and its peculiarities as non-trivial, to high methodological standards and the belief that graphics ease understanding. When the research started 2004, PsychInfo returned around 400 articles concerning Ghana, 2007 the number rose to around 550. This thesis will add up to the psychological knowledge available for Ghana and hopefully sharpens the senses for the scientific maltreatment of a whole continent. The African countries are more than a playground for ethnologists. Their societies and economies are in transformation, in transition. And maybe an unstable system is particularly suited to study its inherent rules. If psychologists want to learn about the context of human behavior, cognition and emotion, why do we ignore Africa? There might be no better place for such an endeavor.Inhaltsverzeichnis:Table of contents:1.Theory11.1The context: Ghana in Africa21.1.1A critique of the 'Africa' construct61.1.2Ghana - historical, demographic and empirical descriptions181.2Person-environment fit301.2.1Attribute domains311.2.2Relational demography321.2.3Diversity331.2.4Theoretical background.351.2.5The case of age401.2.6The case of personality411.2.7Context as a moderator431.2.8Tenure as a moderator441.3Individual and group level outcomes471.3.1Performance figures471.3.2Leader-Member Exchange481.3.3Attitudes501.4Constructivism531.5Concluding hypotheses572.Method622.1Study one652.1.1Participants662.1.2Introduction672.1.3Data-assessment with repertory-grid technique672.1.4Structuring the constructs702.1.5Item generation732.2Study two752.2.1Participants752.2.2Used instruments and their psychometric qualities772.2.3Development of the Leader-Follower Relationship Scale (LFR)872.2.4Fit- and Diversity-Indices942.2.5Workgroup performance982.2.6Bank culture993.Results1013.1Intercorrelations1023.2Data Analyses with HLM1063.3Person-Supervisor Fit results1113.4Person-Workgroup Fit results1203.5Workgroup diversity results1264.Discussion1294.1Results in detail1324.2Limitations1444.3Outlook1465.Literature1486.Appendices173Appendix 1: Repertory Grid and questionnaire layouts174a)Repertory Grid layout 174b)Leader questionnaire, study one175c)Leader questionnaire, study two178d)Follower questionnaire, study two182Appendix 2: RepGrid constructs190a)Structure of generated RepGrid constructs190b)Generated questionnaire items201c)Questionnaire expert ratings of repertory grid constructs205Appendix 3: Psychometrical properties of the used instruments210Textprobe:Text Sample:Chapter 4.1, Results in detail:***:An extensive amount of previous research revealed positive associations between Person-Supervisor (P-S), Person-Group (P-G) and Person-Organization *** Fit on a broad range of outcomes, amongst others leader-member exchange (LMX), liking and affective commitment (see chapter 1.2.2). Some zero results have been reported as well, but no study hypothesized or found a reverse pattern, implying that being of the same *** as one´s supervisor or workgroup would have negative effects.Contrary to hypothesis, this negative association was found for P-S *** Fit in the present study. Especially female participants rated LMX, positive affect towards the leader and relationship style quality higher when working under a male supervisor, while the opposite pattern was found to a smaller extent for male followers. As only dyadic exchange resources were affected, this result might be explained with social comparison theory, as done for similar results pattern gained for age similarity by Pelled and Xin. Working for a supervisor of the same *** might arouse cognitive dissonance if in the inferior role, which in turn negatively affects internal representations of liking, received resources and perceived relationship style in order to devaluate the other to enhance own self-esteem and so solve this dissonance.The higher magnitude of the fit effect in the female sample might be explained by actual leaders´ behavior. As women traditionally assume the inferior role in the Ghanaian society, they might actually grant more exchange resources to male followers, in order to demonstrate their leadership qualities, which is reflected in these followers´ perceptions and liking. This is supported by followers´ income being higher when working under male supervisors, and male followers earning higher wages in general. Interestingly, this association is higher in British than in the Ghanaian bank, possibly reflective of an imported bias against women, stemming from western societies. In Ghana, some ethnic groupings adhere to matrilineal traditions and so might value females more. It also indicated higher wage differences in the British banks in general, plausibly reflective of stronger competition, higher individualism and an outcome-focused attitude towards work. This line of thought will be developed further in the sections below.Not a single P-G *** Fit effect on any of the dependent variables was found, but a significant positive effect of workgroup´s *** diversity on affective commitment. Together with a high correlation of workgroup masculinity and commitment it can be inferred that, irrespective of participants´ own ***, working in a female ***ted workgroup undermines commitment more than working in a male ***ted group. This contradicts earlier findings by Tsui and O´Reilly (1992) who observed that for male participants, working in a male ***ted workgroup was more positively related to affective commitment than for female participants. For banks operating in Ghana, balanced *** distributions seem to be optimal, while especially female but also male ***ted workgroups should be avoided. This result might be explained with social comparison theory. Getting promoted in a workgroup of pre***ntly same *** colleagues might boost self-esteem more, might be more desirable and therefore lead to more competitive conflict within the group and low commitment if one is not promoted. This effect might then be stronger for female followers, as they are usually thought to occupy the inferior role. In mixed groups, *** is more salient and might be used as an explanation to reduce cognitive dissonance if one is not promoted.Age:In chapter 1.2.5 two competing theories were presented which implied opposite directions of age similarity effects. In line with the similarity attraction paradigm, P-S and P-G Fit would have positive effects on emotional relationship oriented outcomes like leader-follower exchange processes or group cohesion and affective commitment. An alternative argument is based on social comparison theory, already invoked for explaining the results for *** fit above. Analyses of P-S, P-G Fit and diversity returned relatively homogenous result patterns, which can be interpreted as supporting similarity attraction, but moderating effects of bank culture, leader´s age and age workgroup homogeneity were also observed; nearly all subjective ratings but no objective criteria were affected.P-S age Fit was significantly positively related to affective commitment, all other entered variables returned significant results as well. Main effects imply that older employees show higher commitment, either a cohort phenomena, a function of tenure, which is correlated to commitment, or reflective of the fact that employees with low commitment are more likely to turnover or get decapitated, and so do not stay for a long time in their organization. Another interpretation is that the age fit result pattern follows the current transitional state of the country. From this point of view, age similarity effects are basically a function of different cohorts with different philosophical and educational backgrounds and a different work ethic. This position would regard age similarity attraction as a mere side effect, while the result pattern found would be based on the unique transitional state of the current country and economy. Followers working under older leaders were found to be generally less committed. As leaders´ age, contrary to that of followers, is negatively related to income and so the level of hierarchy, this main effect is most likely interpreted as the antecedent of a new, young and highly educated (education is strongly negatively correlated with age) elite, pushing into the banking sector as one of the few places in Ghana where they can get an appropriate monetary reward. They strive for fast careers that were not possible for some time after the end of colonization where promotion was basically a function of tenure – a system that was adopted first by post-colonial society but is in transition now. Thus, older supervisors are not fired but shifted into less attractive positions, while the new young leaders learned western management theory, and demand and select for commitment and performance.This interpretation is further supported by the P-S age Fit effect on commitment, which is moderated by bank culture and leader´s age: Age similarity is especially important for follower´s commitment if the leader is old, while for young leaders the fit effect is smaller in British and even negative in the Ghanaian bank. Old followers are more committed when working under old leaders, supposedly because their philosophies of work are better matched and less focused on fast gains and promotion. If young followers work under old leaders, they might not be satisfied with their career perspectives, reflected in the lowest overall commitment; these perspectives would be higher under a young leader. Along this line of thought, they would also experience more competition and cognitive dissonance through social comparison processes, abating the positive effect of fit under a young leader, which in fact was found to be smaller than under an old leader. The differential effect of bank culture here might be due to the Ghanaian bank being still caught in a more traditional system of hierarchy and organization, rooted in colonial administration, where promotion was based mostly on tenure. This assumption gains support through higher negative correlations between supervisor´s tenure and income in British than in Ghanaian banks. Thus, young followers in the Ghanaian bank might not see much chances to advance quickly but have to wait stoically which undermines their commitment. Young followers showing lower commitment scores irrespective of their supervisor´s age in that bank reflect this. A comparison of educational differences across banks revealed that members of the British banks completed significantly more advanced education. And a bank attracting higher educated people likely offers higher chances for careers. Another comparison showed age differences of supervisors in the Ghanaian (mean = 47.5 years) and British banks (mean = 39.9 years), as well as these of the followers (39.7 vs. 34.6 years), to be highly significant.It has to be noted that members of the Ghanaian bank are generally more committed to their organization, a difference mostly accounted for by the low commitment of young followers working under old leaders in the British bank. This was not only a function of members being older in the Ghanaian bank, as correlations were the same when controlled for age. Therefore, it is not lower chances of fast promotion itself that deteriorate commitment, but lower chances in a competitive environment. The Ghanaian bank may well provide an environment satisfying the needs of the Ghanaian population of bank employees, while the achievement pressure, imported by a western system, may negatively affect a healthy relation to one´s company if promised career chances are not provided.Differential effects can also be stated for LMX, which was strongly positively related to P-S age Fit only in British banks, while it was virtually unrelated in the Ghanaian bank. Positive affect towards the leader and relationship quality ratings showed similar patterns but only approached statistical significance. These results further support the argument above: Younger leaders can better account for the needs of young followers, who in turn rate exchange processes to be of higher quality; the same applies to old followers, working under old leaders. Age differences in whatever direction hamper exchange processes, as followers´ needs and leader´s demands differ. This result is in line with similarity attraction theories, assuming age similarity to be due to similarity in values and beliefs as a function of the age cohort, although historical processes actually account for the positive impacts of a fitting combination. The zero result in the Ghanaian bank is possibly based on more egalitarian treatment as far as age is concerned, that does not focus on individual members´ age-varying needs and motives but on those of the collective workgroup. As career chances for young followers might not be as high as in the British banks, this would not lead to conflicting follower´s needs and leader´s demands as for the British bank above. This could further be enforced by a more hierarchical organizational setup, inferred from the hypothesis of more anchoring in traditions of the Ghanaian bank. Common theory on Africa suggests traditional leadership to be patriarchal where age might either not be a similarly salient category or ***ted by rank. Thus, followers are not and do not expect to be treated according to their cohort´s needs and motives. It would be the missing expectation, according for the zero result.

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Person-Environment Fit in Ghanaian Banks: Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: The present study is a blend of three different streams of psychology ¿ cross-cultural, organizational and social psychology. It mixes cross-cultural ingredients about the context - the country Ghana and the continent Africa - with theories about the relevance of social categories in team building processes and spices from I/O psychology ¿ dyadic leader-member exchange and relationship quality, group performance and the inner country context of banks. All to find an answer to the overarching question: Do social categories, more precisely their similarity in dyads or their fit between an individual and his or her workgroup, affect interpersonal relationship and group outcomes such as attitudes or performance in the banking system of the transitional economy Ghana Much has been written on the African way of life, thought and organization, but most of this work is restricted to ethnological knowledge which does not offer a robust theoretical basis, on which a psychological study can be built. The last years saw Africa ranking highest on development aid agendas like the Millennium Development Goals announced by the United Nations because most of the African countries, especially south of the Sahara, have been left behind by the development taking place in most parts of the underdeveloped world within the last fifty years. Many explanations have been attempted, but only a small volume of elaborate research has been undertaken. Often the traditional organization of individuals in clan like micro communities with their own chief and priest and so their own judicial, legislative and executive system is blamed together with a recent history of colonialism, creating country bodies without any historical eligibility and immense ethnic rivalry within and between them. This would have led to a tradition of favoritism and corruption along former and new lines of public organization. These claims are mostly made without empirical evidence and most likely oversimplify state of affairs where a closer look would be necessary. Often, these claims tend to explain the present exclusively by the past, concealing that by now there is a unique present state that might be explained by history as a necessary but not sufficient condition, as a heuristic story for today. Moreover, the thin ice crust of sound empirical studies available on African countries is over-generalized to the total territorial body of Sub-Saharan Africa, ignoring the [...], Englisch, Ebook.

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