Date of Award

2016

Publication Type

Master Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Department

Psychology

Keywords

Discrimination, Organizational Culture, Perceived Discrimination, Psychological Well-Being, Turnover Intention

Supervisor

Kwantes, Catherine

Rights

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Abstract

Research has found that perceived discrimination leads to a range of negative outcomes across various contexts. In the societal context, it is associated with stress, mental health related issues, and a decrease in quality of life (Tummala-Narra et al., 2011). In the organizational level, it is negatively linked with psychological well-being, job satisfaction, job attitude, and turnover intention (Shaffer et al., 2000; Triana et al., 2015). Although there is an abundance of research looking into factors that mitigate the impact of perceived discrimination in the workplace, there is a lack of research that looks into the antecedents of perceived discrimination in an organizational context. This research project looked into the association of perceived discrimination between societal and organizational contexts, its impact on psychological well-being, and turnover intention. Furthermore, this research predicted that organizational culture (i.e. constructive culture norms, passive-defensive culture norms, aggressive-defensive culture norms) affects the association of perceived societal and organizational contexts. Overall, a weak but significant correlation was found on the relationship between perceived societal and organizational discrimination, but the culture of an organization did not impact the association of perceived discrimination between contexts. However, the culture of an organization made a contribution on predicting perceived discrimination in the workplace. Constructive culture norms were found to significantly reduce, while aggressive-defensive culture norms were found to significantly increase an individual’s perception of discrimination in the workplace; passive-defensive culture norms, on the other hand, did not have significant impact to predict perceived organizational discrimination. Consistent with previous literature, perceived discrimination in the workplace predicted an individual’s psychological well-being and turnover intention.

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