Globalization: Understanding the Impact of Cultural Differences in Global Organizations

In an era of growing diversity amongst people in global organizations, the paper addresses the question of why people choose to reject or accept other cultures into their organizational environments. The document collects and reviews the literature on the behaviors, feelings, or beliefs that impact people when encountering cultures that are different than their own. The research examination extends from studies on the acculturation of individuals into an organization, as well as the assimilation process people navigate to understand and adjust to an organization’s culture. In the understanding of culture assimilation into global organizations, the paper identifies cultural background, social experience, environmental culture, biases, negative stigmas, learning ability, and psychological underpinnings as variables that can impact a person’s acceptance or rejection of other cultures in a global organization.

Introduction
In recent years, it seems businesses around the world are relying upon a diverse workforce (Gummer, 2000;Yi, 2015). The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU, 2016) reports that despite growth in globalization, some people and organizations possess an unwillingness to support the addition of other cultures into their environments. The exclusion sometimes results from the attachment or perception of negative cultural stigmas. The negative feelings can lead people to resist acculturation. Also, they may not allow the acculturation process to proceed (Kulik, Bainbridge, & Cregan, 2008: p. 220). The literature defines acculturation as the altering of the norms and values of people who gained their primary learned culture in a different cultural state, and how their contact with a differing culture alters the traits of their previous cultural learning. In the process, there is a likelihood of an influence on the contacting culture (Lakey, 2003: p. 104). The expansion of diversity changes in the workplace has some companies grappling with the challenge to understand what leads people to resist the acceptance of members of a different culture or those who are newly navigating the acculturation process (Dobbin & Kalev, 2016: p. 54). In understanding acculturation, the manager must realize the resistance to the process and how to implement successful management practices to build and lead culturally diverse teams (p. 54). Badea, Jetten, Iyer, & Er-rafiy, 2011;Moeller & Harvey, 2011;and Okoli, 1994 provide the paper's foundation of evidence for resistance to cultural acceptance in organizations. The paper examines and leverages research on cultural beliefs and behavior in the organizational environment. The reason for the examination is that the growth of the global workforce has led to increases in the reliance on world labor from various global regions (Haubert & Fussell, 2006: pp. 503-504).
The people from different social areas bring with them backgrounds of differing cultural ideas, habits, and mannerisms (Odrakiewicz & Zator-Peljan, 2012: p. 127). Despite the need for global labor, the information tells us in countries like the U.S., up to a third of the people may hold nationalistic sentiment or negative biases toward other cultures (Alexander, 2009: p. 3). Haubert & Fussell (2006: p. 489) believe the number of people who feel negatively about foreign labor is closer to 50 percent. The idea that some 30 to 50 percent of people may reject foreign culture, likely means global economies may suffer from the non-selection of capable labor. The rejection is due to cultural biases that eliminate support from global workers that can help an organization (Haubert & Fussell, 2006: p. 489).
The management organizations select to lead their teams will require the skill and competencies to manage people in the presence of cultural differences, and the associative feelings people may bring to the business relating to cultural differences (Kulik, Bainbridge, & Cregan, 2008: p. 218). The work is essential because of the resistance people can show to cultures that differ from their ideas of normalcy, and the impact the negative attitudes can have on the management of an organization (Alexander, 2009: p. 3;Gummer, 2000;Yi, 2015). In some instances, the resistance focuses on things such as race, at other times, religion, nationality, sexuality, or some other recognizable cultural difference (Hofstede, 1985: p. 362). The global movement of people around the world will likely continue to challenge human biases of cultural normalcy (Gummer, 2000: pp. 75-77). The impact of different cultural challenges on the human psyche in the way of cultural sensitivity, therefore, requires additional research as managers must continue to lead in the rise of cultural exchanges in the workplace (Gummer, 2000: p. 77). Morant & Edwards (2011: p. 283) tell us the theory of social representations, which is the belief that there are behavioral changes within the individual that occur in concert with changes in organizational culture, account for the quality and quantity of the socialization process. The work and research of pioneers Barnard (1958), Hofstede (1985), Mitchell & Scott (1985), Schein (1968), and Schein (1988), help to advance and understand theories of organizational and individual culture. The research of these social scientists provides additional support and foundation for the paper. The theoretical basis of these founders provides the backbone of the literature on the studies of cultural acceptance or rejection in global work environments.

Purpose
The purpose of the paper is to answer the question, what cultural beliefs or behaviors lead to acceptance or rejection of cultural differences in an organization?
Specifically, the paper seeks to respond to the query with an examination of the human behaviors that lead to the non-acceptance of the cultural practices of people outside the dominant organizational culture. The paper also seeks to understand the cultural beliefs and behavioral attributes in a host organization that may lead to acceptance behavior. McDonald, Keys, & Balcazar (2007: p. 146) provide information on the psychological strategies people invoke when they face resistance from the culture of others. The review of information looks through the lenses of the manager more so than the perspective of the organization. The reason for focusing on the manager and not the organization is the larger group may have an overarching culture or cultural response that the manager does not share (Rose & Potts, 2011: p. 7). A thematic review of the literature sought themes on feelings and behaviors of the individual to understand why people may exhibit those feelings or beliefs when encountering a culture clash. A cultural clash occurs when opposing cultures come together in an environment, where the coming together of individual or group cultural variables differ, resulting in mental anxiety or stress amongst the group members (Okoli, 1994: pp. 7-8).

Methods
The paper analyzes a range of studies on the reaction people in an organization may have to outside or external cultures. Through an examination of the themes of human behaviors when encountering the phenomenon of associative behavioral responses, that people may have to an encroaching culture, unlike their own or in which they are not familiar. The data will identify the expectations and attitudes of the group members, and the strategies and techniques the manager must understand by reviewing the expectations and reactions of the inner and outer culture members in the context of external cultural acceptance.
The analysis within the paper aims to identify the feelings and beliefs that exist in opposing cultural roles. A synthesis of the research literature helps to determine the themes of expectations or perceptions that can emerge in people to gain insight into what ideas or beliefs advance or hinder cross-cultural interac-tions. The discovery helps to identify feelings, opinions, and thoughts at work in people that the practicing manager can leverage, or in some instances, mitigate when encountering the organizational cultural phenomenon to improve team management.
The accumulation of literature initiates with a search for studies and a thematic review of the literature per the methods of Petticrew & Roberts (2006) in the research, collection, and organization of evidence. The paper also uses evidence-based research methods that involve the research, extraction, review, and presentation of information to present arguments by leveraging empirical research literature (Watts, Holzer, & Tritsch, 2011: p. 495

Data Analysis Techniques
To discover data a keyword search of the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) electronic library database sought data using the keywords words "culture" AND "global" AND "organization" AND "acceptance" OR "clash"; (cultur*) AND (foreign AND organization) AND (accept*). The search found 1022 papers for review. In addition to the UMUC library database, the paper made use of the Google and Google Scholar worldwide web search engine using the keyword search string "individual cultural bias global organizations" and had a return result of about 37,400,000 websites.
To reduce the number of hits from the Google search, the keyword string was altered to use only the Google Scholar input to query the string: individual*, cultur*, glob*, organization*, and bias* returning about 17,600 website results.
To further manage the significant return of data from UMUC and Google Scholar, and to enable a search for legacy papers an "old to new" and "new to old" filter allowed the identification of legacy and contemporary data. The selection of papers was inclusive of those that were relevant to culture, and the acceptance or rejection of members of an organization, group, or team. The paper made use of the "relevancy" sort feature in the database to determine relevant information based on the search keywords. The filtering process found 19 documents from the UMUC search to support the thematic review of the literature on culture rejection or acceptance. The initial identification of data came through a review of the title, abstract, discussion, and conclusion. To expand the search and to identify records on the psychological issues of organizational resistance, the keyword string "diversity" AND "resistance" AND "psychologic*" found 203 records measuring the studies with the same association using the previously mentioned thematic search methods. The search for associated psychological databases provides information relating to culture clashes did identify four additional documents addressing the psychological elements that may be present when cultures clash. A review of the study titles, abstracts, discussions, and conclusions helped in the identification of the research information.

Limitations
Time limitations did constrain the paper. In addition to time limits, the document excludes or limits materials with a singular focus on organizational or corporate culture. The reason for limiting organizational culture is the paper seeks to identify the learning tendencies and responses at the individual level without attempting to address the overall corporate culture. The analysis accepts that organizational culture has a significant role in the culture of the individual, and the role requires some discussion. However, the purpose and goal of the paper are to address and keep intact the cultural expectations and beliefs from the perspective of the individual in the organization.

Analysis
Okoli (1994: p. 7) defines culture via Schein (1992), defining culture as the way a group or community develops its thoughts, perceptions, and feelings of itself and new members. There are cultural behavior forces of organizational culture that act on a manager (p. 8). The pressures align the manager's cultural norms to the standards of the organization, and that may discourage behaviors the group has not agreed to accept into the culture (Okoli, 1994: p. 8). The management practices that establish group environmental behavior can inhibit external perceptions or distinguish internal group cultural practices to accept or reject other cultural values or norms for being different (Okoli, 1994: pp. 7-8).
The practices of management must also control the cultural differences between the team and the manager in an organization. The reason is to ensure the social behaviors of the manager do not interfere with the accomplishment of organizational goals (Singh, 2014: p. 43). The view of the manager by the team upon the manager's entry as a foreigner into an organization's culture can result in an organizational cultural confrontation (Morant & Edwards, 2011: p. 289;Okoli, 1994: p. 25). A clash can occur because the manager represents an altering or encroaching external social culture into an existing cultural environment, where established norms and values already exist (Morant & Edwards, 2011: p. 289;Okoli, 1994: p. 25 In circumstances when team members view the manager as a threat to the social beliefs of the organization, it can result in members both individually and as a group resisting cultural change (p. 82). The resistance is not merely to resist the authority of the manager; the opposition is more a holding to the emotional attachment, or beliefs and acceptable norms the group has in place (Burack & Franks, 2004: p. 82). Schneider (1988: p. 232) suggest the manager has a role not only in leading the unfreezing and the relaxing of the emotional, cultural attachments. The manager also must vet the culture for new members to "fit" into the existing values and norms (p. 232). The leader in changing the organization must understand the employees will initiate strategies to avoid the organizational messages that counter accepted social identity (McDonald et al., 2007: p. 148). Therefore, the manager must be mindful of cultural acceptance and adaptability.

Acceptance and Adaptability to New Cultures
In this research, the paper makes use of studies that speak to the cultural experience and changes of students, as well as workers (Okoli, 1994: p. 25). Okoli  Downey & Feldman (1996), who examine group membership and social assimilation through a study of student rejection sensitivity in close or intimate relationships. Schein (1988: p. 54) explains that the existence of interchangeability of attributes in the assimilation process is similar in the acculturation of people in school, work, or other organizational environments.
People carry cultural distances in organizational relationships (Hofstede, 1985, pp. 347-348). The manager is the psychological identity of the team, and an unconscious psychological dynamic exists between the team and its leader (Burack & Franks, 2004: pp. 82-83). The members of the existing culture may label, stereotype, discriminate, or otherwise resist the encroachment of a manager's new ideas in the organization during the adaptation process (Moeller & Harvey, 2011: p. 2596). Moeller & Harvey (2011: p. 2594, 2596 explain that the cultural traits of incoming managers are often different than those of the incumbent members.
Managers, especially those that are new must lead teams in the diversity of culture, and they must guide team activities to create a diverse environment that removes psychological barriers to cultural diversity (Burack & Franks, 2004: p. 87;Espino & Lee, 2011: p. 150). The manager's ability and flexibility to socialize themselves into a new organization plays a critical role in successful adaptation (Moeller & Harvey, 2011: p. 2596 Hofstede (1985: p. 347) and Schein (1988: pp. 53-54), providing data to support the cultural value systems of behaviors in an organization. Moeller & Harvey (2011: p. 2594 argue that a manager's political skill can mitigate the negative stigmatizations of the culture. The features of political power in an organization can support cultural assimilation; the adjustments include social astuteness, interpersonal influence, networking ability, and apparent sincerity, any of which either together or separately can help the immersion process (Moeller & Harvey, 2011: p. 2597). Bartram (2014: para. 1) supports the view of Moeller & Harvey (2011), explaining managers need to know the people and their needs when defining and understanding the organization's politics. The manager must keep in mind that individuals in the organization may lack the cultural ability, and flexibility to adjust to the environmental changes the new manager brings, due to cultural, social, or economic distance barriers that may challenge the organization's cultural assimilation process and result in cultural rejection (Moeller & Harvey, 2011: p. 2594, 2596.

Host Culture Rejection
A person's initial contact with an organizational environment in which they are not a member generates the desire to define the environment as it relates to their socialization. The contact may also lead to a psychological defense response from members with previous acceptance in the group (Burack & Franks, 2004: p. 89;Okoli, 1994). Also, the members of the organization may reject the admittance of others, due to the perception of stigmas that prevent the voluntary association or free will of the external members seeking to join the group (Moeller & Harvey, 2011). The destabilizing effect of the newcomer and the accompanying anxiety it causes within the team can introduce negative or hostile feelings into the organization, due to the perception of threat to the norms and values that have group acceptance (Okoli, 1994: p. 10).
To cope with the stress group members may access deep conscious cultural information to find an understanding of one another's behaviors with cognitive coping mechanisms that enable a psychological adjustment for the situation and to reduce the threat of the outsider (Burack & Franks, 2004: p. 89;Okoli, 1994: pp. 10-11). The manager as the leader supports the psychological needs of the organization by helping members avoid language or behavior that may support unconscious convictions that cause cultural resistance to external members, and the perception that those members are unfit for the group (Burack & Franks, 2004: p. 89). The sociopolitical forces in an organization can erect barriers to diversity membership that requires the manager to respond by implementing certain psychological benefits to strengthen community acceptance that is significant to the ability of the manager to lead the organization (Fisher & Sonn, 1999: p. 716 (Fisher & Sonn, 1999: p. 716).
Managerial leadership is critical in instances of overcoming cultural rejection (Fisher & Sonn, 1999: p. 716). Miron & Lauria (1998: p. 190) tell us the manager is the nurturer of the team's self-esteem and they can improve the group members positive sense of self-identity cultural immersion and adaptation. The reason for the importance of management intervention is to prevent the perception of acceptance by internal group members that their leaders, allow or enable the behavior of external culture refusal by the host culture. The perception by in-group team members that management condones resistant behavior to out-group members lessens the likelihood of new people developing a positive relationship within the organization (Badea et al., 2011: p. 586). The perception of rejection by the host society degrades team cohesion and results in inner-outer group conflict (Badea et al., 2011: p. 587). Wolfgramm et al. (2014: p. 313) suggest that a person can gain feelings in an organization that provides a foundation for one's self-worth, which can take a negative turn when encountering feelings of rejection (p. 313). The reason for this is people can derive their cultural beliefs of psychological self-esteem from evaluative group acceptance, and the attention they receive from peers in their work environments (Penhaligon, Louis, & Restubog, 2009: p. 35). Smith (1998: p. 49) explains how the work of Barnard (1958) reinforces the idea that the organization provides its people with feelings of accomplishment and self-expression. Therefore, when organizational actions lead members to feelings of rejection, it degrades their self-esteem and creates a negative psychological self-worth response which brings about environmental disengagement (Okoli, 1994: p. 25;Wolfgramm et al., 2014: p. 313). Fisher & Sonn (1999: p. 716) explain that people naturally seek membership in dominant communities as a source of psychological well-being because the dominant group reinforces the cultural norms, values, identities in the organizational environment (p. 716). People have a need to be part of a team; the desire for acceptance is a powerful psychological force of the human conditioning to belong to a purposeful existence (Garris et al., 2011(Garris et al., : pp. 1068(Garris et al., -1069. To preserve a purposeful experience, some team members will separate from the mainstream or host environment, and at times member will pursue cultural integrity to integrate into the host community as the social context dictates (Badea et al., 2011: p. 586). There are people who will show low interest in learning or exploring other global cultures and relationships resulting in the reduction of opportunity for successful integration or assimilation into a new cultural envi-  (Badea et al., 2011: p. 587). However, there is a growing complexity of organizational situations and the likelihood of encountering cross-cultural socialization and assimilation is increasing (Okoli, 1994: p. 2). Schein (1988: p. 63) suggests the organization is a social system that requires management of culture to mitigate disturbances of the cultural equilibrium and to maintain organizational symmetry from the movement of people of varying backgrounds into differing cultural environments (Okoli, 1994: p. 5). People socialize into an organization's environment by learning the cultural rules, norms, values, and behaviors of the new space (Schein, 1988: p. 54). Gălăţeanu (2012Gălăţeanu ( : p. 1035) explains the growth of globalization ties the world in ever-increasing complex inter-dependency relationships. Those relationships will challenge the social acculturation and assimilation process, mental state, and social equilibrium in existence before the increase in globalization activities. Okoli (1994: p. 5) suggests people encountering environmental cultures learn to adjust their psychological behavior through strategies that reconstruct, adapt, change, or reshape their surroundings to regain an anxiety-free mental state.

Cultural Immersion and Adaptation
People take actions to adjust to the environment as a function of personality shaped by cultural, social assimilation, which helps them to address the instances of psychological chaos that may emerge during culture clash (Okoli, 1994: p. 5).
The socialization process, therefore, involves a willingness on behalf of organizational members and managers to learn and manage the cultural environment (Schein, 1988: p. 56). The practicing manager can help with techniques that build commitment and loyalty within the team members through a socialization process that enables feelings of normalcy (p. 56).
The person sponsoring a new member of the organization is a crucial member of the process, and one of the most important role models in ensuring the successful assimilation of people into an organization's culture (p. 56). The acculturation process involves bringing members into the organization by undoing or unfreezing previous values and providing a level of motivation that re-engages members into the group with new behavioral responses (Schein, 1988: p. 56).
The Kurt Lewin 3-Step change model for implementing change is a method to change behavior in the organization (Burnes, 2004: pp. 985-986). The Lewin (1936: pp. 985-986) 3-Step process works by adjusting behavior through the unfreezing, changing, and refreezing the new expectation of norms. Managers can also alter behavior or reshape culture in the organization by using tools such as organizational literature, examples set by key staff members, and rewarding systems of acceptable behavior while extinguishing unacceptable behavior (Schein, 1988: p. 56).

Discussion
The growth of the global market and the culturally diverse global society necessitates an increase in cross-cultural understanding as negative biases against cultural attributes can hurt the world economy, especially when the preferences negatively impact organizational development (Alexander, 2009: p. 3). The cultural ideas, habits, and mannerisms of people from various parts of the globe will continue to grow more complex as social distance and barriers erode under the pressures of globalization (Odrakiewicz & Zator-Peljan, 2012: p. 127). The manager can help the situation through the identification of psychological, social clashes, cultural stigmas, and by training other managers and employees to be aware of the pitfalls, they may encounter as they enter the organization (Moeller & Harvey, 2011: p. 2603. Managers that understand the stages of socialization and the stigma traits, which can impact the acculturation process, are in a better position to lead successful organizational assimilation (p. 2603). Those entering the culture of an existing organization need the knowledge and the skills to recognize the cause, understand mitigation opportunities, and the skills to implement activities necessary to adjust organizational behaviors in a culturally diverse environment (Moeller & Harvey, 2011: p. 2603).

Leadership Strategies and Techniques
This section provides information on key leadership strategies and techniques managers can use to lead teams in the acculturation process. The various approaches and methods can help organizational leaders create an environment of inclusion, acceptance, and positive assimilation for company members. The information is to serve as an introduction to strategies and techniques. A full examination of strategies and techniques is beyond the scope of this paper. Naidoo, Duncan, Roos, Pillay, & Bowman (2007) explain that leveraging community psychology theory can help managers garner a better understanding of the phenomenon of resistance to team members with external culture. The work reveals the manager can use the tenants of community psychology theory to address the cause of resistant feelings in social interactions. Lakey (2003) identifies literature pointing to communication, psychological perspectives, nationality, cultural identification, and personal networks as key components of interest for study. These items can serve as sources of data for strategy and technique to help managers understand the acculturation process. Gajek (2010: p. 1), points to the leadership style of the manager in an organization to create the synergy within a team that sets the values, norms, and behaviors that are acceptable for the success of the group.
The data will first introduce community psychology theory and its impact on communication, psychological perspectives, nationality, cultural identification, and social network strategies and techniques that teams, and managers can use to manage resistance to the acculturation process. Naidoo et al. (2007: pp. 11-12) define community psychology theory as an ecological evaluation of behavior in context and based on legacy influencing issues.
Community psychological theory is a technique and strategy to prevent psychological, social clashes and cultural stigmas before they initiate. The use of the approach involves examining the foundation of problems that may emerge as  (Naidoo et al., 2007: pp. 11-12). Managers need to understand the social environment with the understanding of the background influencing the situation at a micro and macro level (pp. 11-12). The reason is to have the manager implement preventive steps to ensure organizational harmony. The goal is to enable a company culture of acceptance, rather than seeking to fix problems after they develop and to establish early initiative efforts to prevent the issues that can challenge the healthy synergy in an organization (pp. 11-12).
The performance of an organizational team is reliant on the effectiveness of relationships, and the quality of the activities of the human exchanges via company communication, and the exchange of interaction that occurs at face to face contact known as interaction order (Griffith, 2002: p. 256;Morand, 2003: p. 521). The theory being that maximizing group performance is a result of the coordination of the similar and relevant relationships between team members per the management of organizational elements such as structure, strategy, and context (Griffith, 2002: p. 256). Interaction order says that people in certain situations establish rules of comingling, behavior, and group involvement or closeness (Morand, 2003: p. 521).
Theoretically, barriers can arise when elements of the organization encounter dissimilarities in social-relational elements (Griffith, 2002: p. 256). In culturally The psychological perspective of organizational culture is a phenomenon of knowledge that people in an organization possess (Brannen & Lee, 2014: p. 28). The schema expresses that variation in the environmental situation dictates, the mindsets of the team movements and adjustments due to environmental context (p. 28). The social psychological theory states people have an attraction to those like themselves, who share similar values and norms as the likeness promotes mental harmony (Jehn & Mannix, 2001: p. 284). In contrast, people with differing beliefs and values than the inner group can result in tension and disagreements (p. 284).
Cultural conflict may occur between inner and outer groups as a cognitive disagreement on how to perform a task initiates, and emotional conflicts may arise when people encounter differences of opinions (Brannen & Lee, 2014: p. 31). Task conflict can carry positive connotations, while emotional conflict can give a negative connotation (p. 28). Therefore, leaders and managers in globally diverse organizations require the cognitive, cultural competence to integrate the various elements of cultural diversity and perspectives, and the psychological implications of those actions on employees (Brannen & Lee, 2014: p. 12). The meaning then is managers require knowledge that cultural differences matter and require controls and management just as any other area of a business in what is known as possessing cultural metacognition or the way in which the manager, themselves, reaches their decisions (Brannen & Lee, 2014: p. 14).
Leaders need perceptual acuity or the ability to assess and relate perspective views that differ from their own (p. 15).
To improve management of the psychological or cognitive environment, managers can use training and methods that rotate personnel through various cultural experiences to enhance psychological responses to cultural variation in the workplace (Brannen & Lee, 2014: p. 30). Also, the organization can implement discussions that enable cultural diversity communication exchanges to facilitate the transfer of beliefs, ideas, and norms, or misconceptions (p. 32).
There are numerous research claims that diversity enables higher team success. Also, there is counter-evidence that diversity can serve as a hindrance to the successful functioning of teams (Ko, Polzer, Seyle, & Swann Jr., 2004: p. 9).
The challenges of diversity hindering successful team operations can arise through a phenomenon known as self-categorization theory (Bodenhausen, 2010: pp. 8-9;Ko et al., 2004: p. 9). The self-categorization theory says outgroup members of a team will self-separate as they will compete and carry negative feelings such as dislike or distrust with inner group members. The ingroup members will reciprocate the negative feelings the outgroup members display (Ko et al., 2004: pp. 9-10). The opinions of team members are not static and can shift through changing social context and interactions (Bodenhausen, 2010: p. 3). Teams with people operating via self-categorization theory may fail at communicating as they tend to insert group discord through miscommunications as a result of a lack of familiarity with one another (Ko et al., 2004: pp. 9-10). Those who support self-categorization theory believe the way to counter the challenges of self-categorization is for members of the group to shrink away from their unique social identifiers, de-emphasizing their individuality (p. 10). The purpose of shrinking away is to mitigate issues of clashes that can result from self-categorization. In the suggestion to lessen uniqueness, the research appears to ask people to de-emphasize their traits, thereby requesting people to subject themselves to the will of the group over their identification of self (p. 10). The issue is the position counters the values of diversity differences research lauds when placing value on social differences for overall success (Ko et al., 2004: p. 10).
A counter approach to self-categorization theory and focus on one's traits, and those that share those traits, while reducing culture clash is through self-verification theory (Swann Jr., 1983) (Ko et al., 2004: p. 10). The theory states members of the group will try to bring their views into harmony with the team. Also, they remain true to themselves and the individual traits that make them unique and valuable members of the organizational team (p. 11). The data reveals that self-verification contains attributes of human behavior to support harmony in groups, where differences can create cultural clashes (Ko et al., 2004: p. 20).
Team members who verify their views of themselves through positive self-verification interactions are likely to have a positive reception from other group members. The positive response creates confidence and enables members to operate with fresh ideas that can support the organization (Ko et al., 2004: p. 18, 20). Also, the data shows members who receive external social group validation of views they hold of themselves are more likely to demonstrate loyalty and a desire to support the objectives of the overall group. The phenomenon occurs despite differences of diversity because the positive feedback from peers creates feelings of group acceptance, giving validation to diversity differences (Ko et al., 2004: pp. 17-20).
The data also notes people have various diversity traits, resulting in their not having a homogenous social make-up (Bodenhausen, 2010: p. 2). Group members can have dominant social characteristics that stand out among their varying social identities (p. 5). They will compartmentalize and present various social attributes that may support a given contextual situation (p. 6). These include integration or the multiple uses of different social traits (p. 7), that alter and adjust how a person may view themselves and how others see them in their social circle (Bodenhausen, 2010: p. 8). Managers who seek to address the issue of social clashes when cultural identification results in conflict can look to increase the levels of identity integration within their teams to improve diversity interactions and team performance (Bodenhausen, 2010: p. 12). The data shows social identity integration enhances the ability to deal with diversity, through a more comprehensive social knowledge and skills that improve team operations in globally diverse teams (p. 12).
As the influence of globalization continues to take hold around the world, managers must continue to grow their understanding of the need to manage and train for the negative and positive influences of culture and diversity on organizations (Gajek, 2010: p. 1). The manager in setting the values, norms, and behaviors must ensure the use of techniques that are welcoming to new members (p. 1). The ques and communications of management and leadership are essential to the creation of organizational synergy and cultural acceptance (p. 1). The communications must deliver in ways that account for the perception of stereotypes and cultural encroachment, individual opinions of what is normal or acceptable cultural behavior, and the emotional attachment of the organizational members Gajek (2010: p. 2) perceptions of norms. The strategies and techniques involve propagating knowledge within the organization for managers to address the cultural differences among personnel to enable an understanding of the environment, socialization of behavior, and discussing the human factors that can cause issues so managers and the people they lead can take mitigating steps to stop potential problems before they arise.
Through the literature, we learn the initial treatment of individuals upon entering an organization determines their likelihood of cultural assimilation (Badea et al., 2011: p. 594). Positive feedback on a person's presence in the group can help overcome negative feelings or anxiety in an organization where the culture is unfamiliar (Okoli, 1994: p. 14). Those who are assimilating have a role in the process as they must be comfortable in their identity while possessing a willingness to "unfreeze" old ideas of culture and accept the new artifacts, symbols, and cultural attributes of the host culture (see Figure 1) (Badea et al., 2011: p. 594). Jqeger (1986: p. 181) finds that groups will move away from and avoid one another if they perceive they are not welcome in the environment. The negative influence of unwelcoming behavior establishes a competition of mental will for the control of culture (p. 181). The person on the receiving end of the negative response will initiate behavior that shows resistance, fear, and distrust that can degrade the assimilation process resulting in a reluctance to assimilate (Jqeger, 1986: p. 181). In a diverse organization, the presence of cultural stigmatization is an ever-present force to navigate, especially in efforts to bridge cultural differences (Moeller & Harvey, 2011).
The ability of the manager to acknowledge and leverage political skill to move through the various stages of assimilation and socialization can reduce the association of negative stigmas that may hurt an organization's environment (Moeller & Harvey, 2011: p. 2603Schein, 1988: p. 56 (Figure 1) Figure 1. The social environment of culture C1 socializes into the dominant social environment of culture C2. The behavioral phenomenon associated with the socialization acculturation process initiates. The cultural exchange of cultures C1 and C2 starts resulting in behavioral adjustments that become culture C3 (Mayhand, 2016).

Conclusion
In conclusion, the data reveals the cultural beliefs and or behaviors that cause people to reject or accept other cultures into a global organization that results from cultural clashes that may occur from various behavioral inputs. The paper explains the cultural background and socialization of human behavior in which the manager needs awareness. Also, the training and experiences members encounter in the organization have a significant role in their position to accept or reject a different culture.
The criteria for the acceptance or rejection in global organizations depend on the organization's environmental culture and its establishment of the social artifacts, ideas, and behaviors of its members in managing organizational outsiders that lack the organization's cultural artifacts. Managers should expect resistance from the group as the team seeks to resist feelings of anxiety and loss of their cultural identity to a different culture.
Additional behavioral contributions that impact cultural acceptance or rejection are the flexibility and willingness of the host organization members to understand the culture of the requester of membership, as well as, the ability of incoming managers to learn about the host cultures. People desire to be a part of a dominant group, and they also have a psychological predisposition to resist cultures they do not understand. The avoidance of culture that carries artifacts that run counter to the acceptance of beliefs of normalcy can exert levels of psychological anxiety on team members.
The paper finds that the psychological biases, stereotypes, and stigmas established through the origin of cultural socialization either by accident, intention, or imagination play a role in the cross-cultural exchange of people in global organizations. The managing practitioner requires the skill to mitigate the behavioral variables that degrade and to exploit behaviors that advance cross-cultural acceptance. The manager must also ensure the preparation and education of organizational members, the people entering the organization, as well as the leaders who serve in the role of manager to validate their readiness to lead in a diverse global organizational environment.

Future Research
The study identifies and implicates many inputs that can affect the cultural circumstances of a global organization and the things that lead to cultural acceptance or resistance in that environment. The paper does not explain the cognitive foundations that lead people to accept or reject an opposing culture. The ability to understand the essence of the psychological causes of the behaviors can increase the reach of the paper by providing a science-based behavioral understanding that explains why people mentally adopt feelings of rejection or acceptance.

Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper.


Mediating Role of Boredom in the Workplace on Turnover Intention: A Proposed Framework

Boredom in the workplace is commonly described as one of the negative and widespread phenomena where its increasing trend can be seen among employees on all occupational levels. However, the number of investigations performed on the occurrence of boredom in the eastern countries is limited. This study conceptualizes the causal and consequences of boredom in the workplace underpinned by the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) theory. Subsequently, it postulates that boredom among employees occurs due to work-related characteristics (i.e.: job demands, job resources) and individual personality traits, as well as time orientation cultural dimension, which may lead to their turnover intention. Furthermore, several hypotheses are proposed in this study. This paper provides several empirical contributions by highlighting the tendency of boredom to occur in the workplace which may leads to the turnover intention. By determining its antecedents, boredom in the workplace can be curbed and the turnover intention can be prevented in a more practical way.

The highest bored employees are from administrative and manufacturing jobs and the least bored are healthcare workers and teachers ("Teaching 'the least boring job '," 2006). This finding is in line with Fisher's (1994) proposition that academician's profession had been associated with low occupational stress, less workload, and flexible working hours. However, the scenario is changing drastically. Globalization and increase cost of living had added more stress to academicians (Kalimo & Hakanen, 2000) due to its need to produce the "best brain" which meets the market demand (Knight, 2002). In a recent report, academicians claimed that they applied high job demands, such as teaching, researching, sourcing grant, publishing papers, student consulting, and administrating work (Jaschik, 2013). At the same time, students' unmanageable behaviors increased the job demands applied to academicians (Chang, 2009). Moreover, previous works of literature on academicians show that there is a global association between profession and exhaustion from work (Nobile & McCormick, 2007;Shuster & Finkelstein, 2006) in countries including Malaysia (Makhbul & Khairuddin, 2013;Mustapha & Wee, 2013, Zakaria & Asmawi, 2015. These would most likely lead to more turnover intention and absenteeism (De Croom et al., 2004).
In Malaysia, the actual academicians' turnover in private higher education institutions (PHEI) at a critical stage. According to the Ministry of Education Malaysia (2015), PHEIs recorded a sudden shortfall of 8,516 academicians in 2013. From that point onward, they have been constantly facing a shortage of academicians until today (Hashim & Mahmood, 2011). This phenomenon might be a challenge for the ministry to achieve its aim of increasing the number of academicians' enrolment, particularly in PHEIs by the year 2025, as stated in the Malaysia Education Blueprint (MEB). Thus, the proposed study would like to identify: 1) what causes boredom to occur among academicians in private higher education institutions, and 2) how is it related to turnover intention?

Problem Statement
Firstly, boredom has been found to be influenced by organization and individual factors (Fisher, 1994;Mercer-Lynnet al., 2014). No known research has combined both organizational level (job demands and resources) and individual level such as personality in one study. No known research has taken into consideration cultural dimension such as, time orientation, in investigating boredom. Therefore, in this present study, personality traits namely, neuroticism and extraversion are included to develop a framework for boredom. Time orientation (monochromic versus polychronic) is also included in the study. Secondly, Western scholars have critically emphasized exhaustion from work as one of the factors of the turnover intention rather than boredom. High employees' turnover intention in Malaysia is closely associated with low job satisfaction and organizational commitment (Yin-Fah et al., 2010;Lew, 2011;Nor & Johari, 2011;Hassan et al., 2015;Azalea & Mei-Hua, 2015). Not much investigation has investigated the possibility of boredom to induce turnover intention. While study showed that academicians inflicted with boredom face a higher risk of unproductivity and unpleasantness compared to those who are exhausted from work (Reijseger et al., 2013). Thirdly, the issue of boredom has been largely studied in western context namely Netherlands (Reijseger et al., 2013;Van Wyk et al., 2016), Finland (Harju et al., 2014), United States (Bruursema et al., 2006Watt & Hargis, 2010), United Kingdom (Game, 2007), Italy (Guglielmia et al., 2013), Canada (Tze et al., 2014), Australia (Whiteoak, 2014) under various settings. There are limited investigations among the Eastern countries except in Pakistan (Sohail et al., 2012; or Malaysian context (for exception Krasniqi et al., 2019 in petroleum company; Hasanudin et al., 2016). Boredom, although is a universal experience, it can be expected to be culture specific and culture dependent. Thus, this study will provide some insights on boredom from Eastern context by using Malaysia as an exemplar. Nonetheless, boredom from other perspective is possibly known as a relaxation or reflection session. Darden (1999) mentioned that being bored allows employees to get their focus back to their activity. In addition, Belton and Priyadharshini (2007) interpreted boredom as a stimulus to encourage new ideas and actions. However, the negative impacts of boredom see it as the factor of an organization's deterioration.

Boredom in the Workplace
Boredom in the workplace is described as one of the widespread, contagious plaque in the modern society, which is closely associated with blue collar and white-collar employees (Heijden et al., 2012) at an increasing trend. It can be described as the feeling which builds up within the employees towards their job and the working environment when they are exposed to monotonous or repetitive activities, particularly in automation and technology-assisted environment (Cummings et al., 2016). Loukidou et al. (2009) related boredom to employees' experience in under-challenged (unpleasant) and under-stimulated (low activation) activities, while Pekrun et al. (2010) associated it with the absence of value in getting jobs done. On the other hand, Reijseger et al. (2013) defined boredom as the employee's incapability to concentrate on their jobs. Combining these descriptions altogether, boredom is defined as the state of "disconnection" of an individual in terms of cognition, emotion, and physical strength. This individual also lacks interest, passion, and attention to their job due to a nonstimulating working environment where organizational outcomes can easily be affected.
How does boredom occur? In answering this question, it is important to recognize employee's capability in relation to their job characteristics and working environment in order to achieve optimal performance. Some authors suggested that boredom occurs when the competence of employees exceeds the demands and challenges of the organization. It could be simply said that they are over-qualified for the organization. Besides, with their knowledge and the assistance received from technology, their routine job will become easier. Although these may lead to a significant increase in employees' productivity, they will start to get bored with the challenges in their line of work does not measure up to their capabilities. In other words, highly educated employees who are enrolled in lower positions in their jobs are prone to experience boredom (Leonhardt, 2009).
However, boredom is frequently neglected and is classified as an inconspicuous, "silent" emotion, as compared to other affective conditions which do not manifest disruptiveness. There is also a lower possibility of gaining mental disorder compared to the possibility of anger and anxiety. Although sounds simplistic, boredom at workplace has been identified by Department of Occupational Safety and Health, Ministry of Human Resources Malaysia as one of the contributing factors to drugs and alcohol abuse among employees. In addition, International Labor Office (ILO) Geneva on Stress at Work Prevention Checkpoints also highlighted that alternative tasks should be provided to employees to prevent boredom. It is important because previous research demonstrated that boredom has negative impact to individuals and organizations such as job performance, attendance, wellbeing and monetary loss.

Role Conflict and Boredom
Role conflict is an important dimension of job demands. It occurs when an individual is confronting with two or more job requirements or when an individual must behave against own personal values (Brewer & Clippard, 2002), when individual juggle with many roles (Eby et al., 2005) and there is a mismatching between job requirement and expectations. Clashes happen when demands from superior, subordinates and co-workers are conflicting. In consequence, the role overlapping nurture incompatible demands on individual which induce negative emotion resulting failure to perform the job (Cooperet al., 2001).
Taking education as an example, higher education is experiencing paradigm shift from traditional to global education, open market economy, long life education, and learner centred education (Venkatasubramanian, 2002) where it promotes "One World" and "Global Village", knowledge without barriers. Therefore, employees i.e., academicians are expected to be more responsive. One of the responds that could be capture are role conflict. They are expected to be administrator, researcher, consultant, invigilator, coordinator and lecturer. Academicians are experiencing role conflict where different responsibilities are structurally required to perform (Gmelch & Torelli, 1994). It increases the possibility of role overloaded (Tarrant & Sabo, 2010). On top of that, profit orientation by private universities in which put forward number of recruits further enrich academician's role. There are expected to support the growing number of students parallel with greater role (Ceylan & Uluturk, 2006). Ability to do many roles may hinder employees from experiencing boredom. However, role conflict may also lead to boredom as employee does not know how to prioritize and where to start.

Workload and Boredom
Workload is the amount of work that need to be done within a specific duration of time. There are two perceptions of workload against boredom namely higher workload and underload. Firstly, boredom is negatively related with higher workload (Daniels, 2000). Higher workload mean employees are entrusted by organization to do more within a specific time frame. In such activating environment, they may find their job to be reversed "passive jobs" and hence, avoiding boredom. Secondly, Van Wyk et al., (2016) argued boredom is positively related to work underload. Work underload can be defined as having little things to do within a time frame (Larson, 2004) and such work does not match to the employees' competence, skills and knowledge. As a result, employees may find the job unchallenging and thus, experience boredom. Such findings are consistent with control value theory where it parks boredom as an achievement emotion arises from unpleasant and deactivating activity in due to the loss of control and value of the work (Pekrun, 2006). Therefore, as employees received greater workload, they are stimulated instead of getting bored.

Job Autonomy and Boredom
Job autonomy is "the degree to which the job provides substantial freedom, independence and discretion to the individual in scheduling the work and in determining the procedures to be used in carrying it out" (Hackman & Lawler, 1971) and providing employees with opportunities to learn, grow and lead (Manz & Sims, 2001). In such circumstances, employees may experience challenging jobs, thus impede boredom. However, (Bashir, 2011) disclosed that some may dislike job autonomy as it requires more commitment, trust and responsibility to be deployed into the job with little support (Langfred, 2004). In such circumstances, employees may experience unchallenging jobs, thus boredom is experienced.

Social Support and Boredom
Social support is regarded as the availability of helping relationship between colleagues. Such relationship exists in term of encouragement towards job participation, guidance and attention (Rodriguez & Cohen, 1998). In this present study, social support refers to the availability of co-workers or superiors who are friendly and communicative in solving problems encountered by employees. As noted by Nor & Johari, the meaningful job feedback can be deemed as one of the social support element that can provided the quality of work life towards the worker. Employees are loaded researching, lecturing, marking, and recruiting as well as being administrator, invigilator, and mentor. Hence, it is believed that employees may experience lacking support in completing the tasks, which may lead to boredom.

Neuroticism and Boredom
Neuroticism is a negative personality trait with high stress sensitivity (Suls, 2001). Employees with high neuroticism are those who are associated with negative affect, inability to cope with stress, pressure and emotionally unstable. Spector et al., (2006) reported that individual with high neuroticism perceived challenging work as threatening and tends to view the world negatively. Such characteristic has predetermined that neuroticism are correlated with negative performance outcomes such as in psychological distress, job satisfaction (Judge, Heller, & Mount, 2002) and health impairment (Bakker et al., 2010). In this present study, neuroticism is referred to the tendency of an academician experiencing distress with negative affect personality. Due to low tolerance towards challenging job with negative affect, academician with neuroticism is most likely to encounter boredom at workplace.

Extroversion and Boredom
Employees with high extroversion are those who are associated with positive affect, sociability, optimism and personal energy, that demonstrate high enthusiasm and most of the time, being active resulting greater tendency to experience positive emotions. In addition, extroverts perceived challenging work positively and rewarding in due to more favourable working conditions (Bakker et al., 2010) coupled with energized and fun-loving characteristic (McCrae & Costa, 2003). Empirically, extroversion is linked to the positive performance outcomes such as job satisfaction (Judge, Heller, & Mount, 2002), organizational commitment (Bakker et al., 2010) and work engagement (Langelaan et al., 2006). Thus, extrovert is less likely to experience burnout and boredom (Bakker et al., 2005).

Boredom and Turnover Intention
Boredom is regarded as a negative state of cognition, emotion and physical strength that strike employees to be deactivated and unpleasant with of their unchallenging job. Boredom as a negative wellbeing (Whiteoak, 2014) are driving employees to perform negatively such as ill health (Harju, Hakanen, & Schaufeli, 2014), job dissatisfaction (Spector & Fox, 2006), poor job performance (Watt & Hargis, 2010), high absenteeism (Wan et al,, 2014), and poor organizational commitment (Van Wyk et al., 2016). Across time, turnover intention may therefore occur as employees are constantly dissatisfied with the job and organization. The final action of turnover may happen if the situation is becoming worsen and none control, and intervention exertion took place by the managers. As boredom is a negative emotion, it is most likely to expect that employee will experience turnover intention.

Workload, Boredom and Turnover Intention
The direct relationship of workload and job burnout had been long established in the literature among scholars. In this present study, boredom at workplace will be introduced as a mediator between workload and job burnout. Based on control value theory, it is argued that as employee's loss their ability to control and value their current activity, they will experience changes in term of emotion instead of affecting wellbeing directly. On the other hand, when employees regard heavy workload as challenge, they may have lesser tendency to experience boredom and be less likely to encounter job burnout. On another hand, when employees perceived underload as unchallenging, they are prone to experience boredom and most likely to encounter job burnout.

Job Autonomy, Boredom and Turnover Intention
Job autonomy has frequently associated as determinant for intrinsic motivation that significantly related to work engagement (Demerouti et al., 2001). As employees are empowered, it engenders greater responsibility and trust in executing work which allow employees to learn, grow and lead (Manz & Sims, 2001) through challenging task. However, some employees prefer to be followers (Bashir, 2011) instead of being authorized as it requires more commitment, trust and responsibility to be deployed into the job with little support (Langfred, 2004). In this present study, boredom at workplace will be introduced as a mediator that mediates the positive direct relationship between job autonomy and turnover intention. Guglielmi et al., (2013), provide two perspectives of job autonomy among employees.
On the positive side, job autonomy increases learning opportunities and promote employees' enthusiasm and motivation to invest effort in getting their work done. Due to that, employees are hindering boredom at workplace and receive job satisfaction which may turn down turnover intention. On the negative side, employees may view job autonomy as "extra work" which increase their responsibilities and commitment which eventually reduce their learning opportunities making the job unchallenging and bored. In addition to that, Nor and Johari (2011) emphasized that the non-meaningful job autonomy chances does contributed to the tendency to leave. Different setting of job autonomy will give different impression and adaptation to the individual. Therefore, employees receive greater job dissatisfaction. In such situation it may initiate turnover intention.

Social Support, Boredom and Turnover Intention
Social support is an important element of job resources and found to be crucial determinant for employees' turnover intention. Whenever employees are having strong social support, they are eager to work and may find their work interesting instead of getting bored and hence lowered turnover intention (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004;Alzyoud et al., 2015). In this present study, boredom at workplace will act as a mediator between social support and turnover intention. As the employees are overloaded, it is possible that they may have poor social support. Under such circumstance, employees who need support are most likely to be demotivated and may get bored easily as they are working alone without support. Across time, it may initiate turnover intention. On other hand, greater social support generates challenging tasks in which motivate employees to progress and invest effort by seeking assistance from co-workers or superiors. Across time, they are motivated and engaged to the work and lower turnover intention.

Neuroticism, Boredom and Turnover Intention
Past studies had documented employees with neuroticism are closely related to negative outcomes such as psychological distress, job dissatisfaction (Judge et al., 2002) and health impairment (Bakker et al., 2010). Such findings deduced that neuroticism personality is more susceptible to boredom at workplace. According to Pekrun (2006), emotion is a response shown by employees after appraising an event and situation in term of control and value. Employee with neuroticism personality prefers to interpret events negatively and have lower tolerance towards challenging event (Spector et al., 2006). Hence, employees with such personality are most likely experiencing boredom at workplace as compare to others. High boredom may influence high turnover intention.

Extroversion, Boredom and Turnover Intention
Past studies had documented employees with extroversion are closely related to positive outcome such as job satisfaction (Judge et al., 2002) and organizational commitment (Bakker et al., 2010). In fact, Langelaan et al., (2006) reported extroversion is positively related to work engagement, specifically in the aspect of vigour (Brief & Weiss, 2002). Such findings deduced that extroversion personality is less susceptible to boredom at workplace. According to Pekrun (2006), emotion is a response shown by employees after appraising an event and situation in term of control and value. Employee with extroversion personality is positive, energized, active and fun-loving (McCrae & Costa, 2003). It nurtures optimal positive wellbeing (Keyes et al., 2002) in dealing with challenging task. Due to such personality, boredom is most unlikely to occur. This is supported by O'Hanlon (1981) where extroverts have a lower level of boredom at workplace as compared to introvert. Less boredom may lead to lower turnover intention.

Time Orientation
Time orientation can be divided into two, which are Monochronic and Polychronic. M-time views time as linear, an entity to be saved, spent or lost (Manrai & Manrai, 1995). So individuals with monochronic time orientation (monochrons) prefer to complete one task at a time and adhere to a rigid appointment schedule. While promptness is important, the social context of interactions is given low importance (Manrai & Manrai, 1995). M-time is more common in Western developed countries such as the United States and Western Europe.
In contrast, P-time views time as fluid and flexible, and polychrons prefer to work on multiple tasks before completing one (Bluedorn et al., 1992). Punctuality is negotiable and constant interruptions are tolerated (Storz, 1999). A high level of interaction among employees could be observed in polychronic) because they are more relationship oriented. P-time is more common in developing countries such as Asia (except Japan), Latin America and the Middle East (Manrai & Manrai, 1995).
As Malaysia is still categorized as a developing country with collectivist values, it is considered as having a predominantly polychronic time orientation. According to Storz (1999), Malaysian businesspeople view time as subjective. The Malaysian 'rubber time' concept suggests that time is changeable and stretchable, therefore punctuality, deadlines, forecasting and planning are moveable. The attitude of 'rubber time' may create less boredom because the social and relational aspect of the business is more important than the business per se.

Consequences of Boredom
Evidently, boredom in the workplace has more negative impacts on health (Harju et al., 2014), job performance (Watt & Hargis, 2010), job satisfaction (Spector & Fox, 2006), employees' emotion (Culp, 2006), attendance (Wan et al., 2014), and well-being (Loukidou et al., 2009), across various countries. Moreover, it leads to monetary loss at the organization level. To prove this point, Malachowski (2005) found that one-third of 10,000 United States employees spend two hours of their working hours for personal matters, and this causes a $750 billion total loss per annum. In addition, Eddy et al., (2010) conducted a study on various occupations, and they reported that employees inflicted with boredom spend almost five hours for personal activities, such as using the Internet, emailing, making phone calls, or conversing with co-workers during the workweek.

Summary
The important yet unexplored issue of boredom in the workplace provides ample opportunities for research on this issue to be carried out. Boredom is possibly one of the important key elements in determining employees' turnover intention, As shown in Figure 1, the boredom framework is developed by investigating its causes, consequences and mediating as well as moderating effect. Boredom, although is a universal experience, it can be expected to be culture specific and culture dependent. Thus, this study proposes to examine cultural factor, i.e., time orientation (monochronic and polychronic) as moderator between antecedents and boredom, and boredom to consequences. Hence, identifying the root problems of boredom in the workplace, human resource practitioners will be assisted in reducing the occurrence of boredom in the workplace in more practical ways, such as job redesigning and training. Ultimately, the turnover intention will be reduced.


Towards a Conversational Measure of Trust

The increasingly collaborative decision-making process between humans and agents demands a comprehensive, continuous, and unobtrusive measure of trust in agents. The gold standard format for measuring trust, a Likert-style survey, suffers from major limitations in dynamic human-agent interactions. We proposed a new approach to evaluate trust in a nondirective and relational conversation. The term nondirective refers to abstract word selections in open-ended prompts, which can probe respondents to freely describe their attitudes. The term relational refers to interactive conversations where respondents can clarify their responses in followup questions. We propose a systematic process for generating nondirective trust-based prompts by using text analysis from previously validated trust scales. This nondirective and relational approach provides a complementary trust measurement, which can unobtrusively elicit rich and dynamic information on situational trust throughout a human-agent interaction.

Introduction
As increasingly autonomous systems are introduced into existing human-centric environments, frequent exchanges of information between humans and machines will be required to address evolving and dynamic situations (Chiou and Lee 2015;Fong et. al. 2005;Parasuraman, Sheridan, and Wickens 2000;Sun. 2006). During dynamic interactions, poor calibration of capability, barriers to interpretability, and difficulty understanding Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems can cause people distrust or overtrust (Lee and See 2004). A common solution is to have the AI explain its decisions to users. An underexplored aspect of explainable AI is the interactivity of the explanation between explainer and explainee in a conversation (Hilton 1990;Miller 2019). In this paper, we propose a nondirective and relational perspective for measuring trust through a human-agent conversation using conversational indicators of trust.

Reconsider the Gold Standard Trust Scale
A long-established method for evaluating trust is a self-reported scale following a Likert-style survey format. Trust scales usually consist of directive statements and descriptions of human-agent relationships. For example, the frequently used trust scale in automation by Jian, Bisantz, Drury (2000) has items such as "the system is suspicious." Respondents typically record their attitudes on a continuum from 1 (not at all) to 7 (extremely). Although frequently used, this approach suffers from some limitations when assessing human-agent relationships. First, since the directive survey is heavily text-based, the administration process often forces an interruption while people are interacting with the agent. Therefore, it is hard to capture the dynamics of trust calibration that might require many administrations of the survey. Second, the direct descriptive statement does not leave respondents with adequate freedom to identify, form, and explain their feelings and opinions (Gobo 2011). For example, the statement "the system is suspicious" might cause anchoring bias, where people rely on this pre-existing information (e.g., suspicious) to judge their trust in agents. Third, most popular scales have the potential to cause positive bias in automation due to the order effect and the unbalanced design of positive-negative items (Gutzwiller et al. 2019). Finally, trust scales depend on and reflect human-agent relationships. Since the nature of these relationships has drastically changed in response to technological developments, past scales can be outdated and inapplicable to the inquired relationship (Merritt et al. 2019). Therefore, there is a need for an alternative or complementary trust measurement.

A Nondirective and Relational Approach to Trust Measurement
The non-directive approach, deriving from the psychotherapy of Carl Rogers (1957), is designed to encourage and motivate respondents to provide clarifying information throughout the conversation, with indirect questions from therapists. In this paper, we adopted a nondirective approach to elicit respondents to answer open-ended questions in their own words to evaluate trust in automaton in a relational conversation.

Nondirective conversation
The term nondirective addresses issues on a lexical level by ensuring the choice of words in prompts are abstract and non-leading. This probes respondents to describe their own attitudes and feelings on topics of trust in automation instead of using the presumed attitudes and descriptions stated in the survey (e.g. suspicious vs. attitudes). This nondirective characteristic gives respondents more cognitive space to reflect on their trust towards the agent throughout the interactive process (Clancey 1984). A strength of this approach is that it encourages respondents to recall their interactions using their own language. In comparison, a survey with direct statements, where respondents recognize their attitudes first and then select a point to reflect their feelings, will cause respondents to reflect on their interactions even if they do not have a strong opinion.
A continuum of directive-nondirective prompts (i.e. descriptive, conceptual, declarative, and interpretive) is listed in Figure 1. Descriptive questions are a direct mapping of the statements in the survey (for example, "the system's actions will have harmful outcomes" turns into "to what extends do you think the system's actions will have harmful outcomes"). With descriptive questions, the specific attributes of the system are being described to respondents, which typically yields closed-ended responses. Conceptual questions involve understanding the attitudes of participants towards core concepts. For trust, these concepts would include purpose, performance, and process (Lee and See 2004). Declarative questions are used for opening questions because they usually result in an unbiased narrative from respondents. Interpretive questions are follow-up probing questions. These are used when interviewers do not fully understand respondents' answers, or the answers do not fit for the core aim of the conversational survey.

Relational conversation
Relational addresses issues from a conversational level. This means the responses can be clarified in an interactive manner with a conversational agent, instead of being forced through a one-shot, closed-ended, point-based system (Chiou n.d.). The relational characteristic can capture more dynamic and rich information in an unobtrusive manner. In comparison to only numeric survey data, the conversation information contains content delivered by vocal cues, conversational turn-taking, sequences of attitude, and conversational ending.
A relational conversation can also provide an unobtrusive assessment of trust while the user operates the primary task of an experiment, such as driving. The continuity of the conversation promises the integration of a conversational agent into the experimental system, which allows trust to be monitored dynamically. By employing this method, we can capture situational trust throughout various scenarios including both external variability (i.e. complexity of a system, task difficulty, workload, perceived risks and benefits) and the internal variability of the people (i.e. self-confidence, subject matter expertise, familiarity, attentional capacity) (Hoff, Bashir 2015). The relational approach provides a means for building bidirectional trust e.g., provides states, goals, attitudes, such as trust indicators, from human to agent, and gains insights about system capability from agent to human (Ezer et. al. 2019).
To structure the relational conversation, we propose to start with declarative questions and follow with conceptual questions with the slot-filling technique to probe theoretical concepts that must be evaluated. Throughout the survey, the interviewee may ask interpretative and/or descriptive questions if needed.
An example of the proposed conversational survey with nondirective prompts is shown in Figure 2. The conversation starts with declarative question. Positive and negative intents are designed and classified in the agent conversational architecture. If the negative intent is detected, shown  as the user's first response in the figure ("I don't really like it"), the follow-up interpretative question would occur ("Can you explain what makes you dislike it?"). Once the user answers the follow-up question, the agent would initiate the conceptual question in the formulated prompts based on slot-filling ("Can you tell me your thoughts on system performance?"). Another descriptive question is followed up. The nondirective characteristic reflects in the lexical selection highlighted in the figure (e.g. system performance). The relational characteristic reflects the back and forth conversation with the designed follow-up intents. This example is a simple running demo to show a novel perspective of relational and nondirective approach. Some aspects of this approach that are still in development include the formulation of additional scenarios, the architecture of the agent, the process for response decoding, and the analysis method. The planned studies to address these aspects are discussed in the Future Work section.
In this paper, we discussed some limitations of the traditional trust scale and proposed a relational and nondirective approach as a supplementary method to measure trust called, conversational survey, which can measure situational trust dynamically and unobtrusively. Similar, to a structured interview, we incorporate a conversational chatbot and text analysis techniques to develop a relational and nondirective approach to measure trust. The methodology of conversational survey of trust requires prompt generation, response decoding, analysis, and scoring. For this paper, due to space limitations and project progress, we only outlined the first step in the method: prompt generation. The relational and nondirective prompts can provide a novel and meaningful perspective to elicit and measure trust, especially for dynamic relationships between humans and agents.

Basis for Trust Prompts
A thorough review of trust scales was conducted by Alsaid, Lee, and Chiou (2020). The authors categorized trust assessment scales into three domains (i.e., trust in automation, trust in e-commerce, and trust in humans) and three temporal compositions (i.e., dispositional trust, history-based trust, and situational trust). The analysis identified similarities between the trust scales at the level of the scale as a whole, items within scales, and words encompassed in items. Their results provide insight into the common words used to assess trust in general, and in each domain. In our proposed method, we built on their findings to construct nondirective prompts in conversational trust surveys that can be used to evaluate trust through conversations.

Text Analysis to Identify Trust Prompts
To provide nondirective trust prompts, it is essential to analyze trust-related words and their latent meanings. Rather than taking a qualitative approach (e.g., open coding or axial coding), which is subjective, laborious, hard to replicate, and dependent on expertise in theoretical understanding of trust, we used text analysis to extract nondirective words and form trust prompts.

Word Embedding
A key idea in the examination of textual data is representing words as numeric vectors, known as embeddings. Word embeddings describe words in vectors in a high-dimensional semantic space based on their co-occurrence of words within a small chunk of text across a large corpus of documents. Numerous methods can be used to train estimate word embeddings (Goldberg and Levy 2014;Pennington et. al. 2014). For more details on theoretical comparisons between methods, see Alsaid, Lee, and Chiou (2020). In our paper, we use the Global Vectors for Word Representation (GloVe) method, developed by Pennington, Socher, and Manning (2014). GloVe is an embedding technique based on factorizing a matrix of word co-occurrence statistics, which shows improved interpretability and accuracy.

Hierarchical clustering
Hierarchical clustering is a method of cluster analysis for identifying groups in a dataset. It can result in a tree-based representation of data, called a dendrogram, which shows the hierarchical relationship between clusters. The horizontal axis of the dendrogram represents the distance or dissimilarity between clusters. The vertical axis represents the clusters. Each node represents the joining or fusion of two clusters by the splitting of a horizontal line into two horizontal lines on the graph. The horizontal position of the split, shown by the short vertical bar, gives the distance (dissimilarity) between the two clusters. Using the numeric representations of trust words from the word embedding, we can create a hierarchy of trust-related word clusters. Based on the dendrogram representation of trust words and methods for text summarization, the high-level node information can be mapped to the nondirective words to capture its lower level trust words.

Method
To generate the nondirective prompt, we first composed the dataset using exact wordings in the surveys identified by Alsaid, Lee, and Chiou (2020), which are highly influential trust scales (see Figure A. 1 and Figure A. 2). Then we processed the data by converting all words in lower case, removing stop words and stemming the words to extract the base form. A ten-step procedure is outlined below: 1. Identify your domain Differences in domains would result in the various definitions and measurement focus of trust. The trust scales can be categorized by three domains: human by accessing the interpersonal trust; E-commerce by accessing consumers' trust in brand; and automation by accessing trust in technology, automation, robot, intelligent agents generally. For the scope of this paper, we would filter scales pertaining to the automation domain based on scales selected in Alsaid, Lee, and Chiou (2020).

Rank domain-specific words
The log odds ratio of words representing the proportion of domain-related words in each scale is shown in Alsaid, Lee, and Chiou (2020) (see Appendix Figure A. 1). Using filtered scales based on our focused domain from step 1, we can rank scale in Figure A. 1 based on domain-related percentages of trust words in automation, from high-to-low. This step can give us the scale ranking by the "most significant terms to distinguish trust" in this specific domain.

Rank domain-specific citations
Then rank the similar scales based on the number of citations the papers have received to highlight the more popular 9 scales in the Figure A. 1. The number selected for filtering the scales can be changed based on the size of the original dataset and the words needed for prompt development. The larger the number, the more items are included in further analysis. Although this approach is more inclusive, more items will tend to increase variance.

Rank by construct-specified words
Similar to domain related words, differences in trust construct would result in the different wording selections for trust scales. The trust can be categorized by three constructs: dispositional measuring people's general tendency to be complacent and trusting; history-based measuring people's trust based on involving interactions and experiences; situational measuring trust in a specific scenario or context. Since the conversational characteristics can dynamically capture the scenario variability, we would focus on situational trust measurement for this paper. Rank Figure  A. 2 based on the selected categories of the trust construct, situational, from high-to-low.

Rank construct-specific citation
Based on results from step 4, rank the similar scales based on citation and highlight the top 3 scales in the targeted category (i.e. situational trust).

Generate database for prompt generation
Take a union set of results based on step 3 and step 5 and list out all items of each scale. Then, add any additional validated scales that are not included in the original dataset when it is published.

Calculate the word embedding
Combine all items as bag of words to conduct the word embedding. Transform words into a numeric representation.

Perform hierarchical clustering
Apply hierarchical clustering based on step 8 results to form the dendrogram showing the hierarchical relationship between trust words.

Select hierarchical word representation of trust
Based on the dendrogram, identify the threshold to 'cut the tree', which means to define how many clusters of words to keep. We adopted the centroid-based text summarization of the word embeddings in each cluster (Rossiello, Basile, and Semeraro, 2017). Using the centroid information, we can map its word embedding into the nondirective terms eliciting trust.

Formulate non-directive prompts
Follow the adjusted guidelines of nondirective approach and correspond to the continuum of directivenondirective prompts in Figure 1 to form the structured questions and unstructured prompts in the conversation to elicit trusting (Josefi and Ryan 2004). The 10-step procedure described has two functions: 1) steps 1-6 researchers provide guides the selection of scales and develop trust measurement based on existing ones; 2) Steps 7-10 are generate nondirective conversational prompts. The result from dendrogram in step 9 shows the hierarchical word presentation and summarization of trust, which can be used to extract the inclusive and nondirective words to identify lower-level trust-related words.

Future Work
The methodology of conversational measure of trust consists of a process of prompts generation, responses decoding, analysis, and scoring. In this paper, we only presented a general method framework for the first part: nondirective prompt generation. Additionally, although conversational survey promises to give researchers rich information, it is only meaningful when analyzed appropriately. Results of prompt generation, the continuing response decoding, analysis, and scoring are still in process. Detailed processes and evaluation of text augmentation will be provided in the future study. We are also interested in further analyzing the role issues of the conversational agent: whether to administrate trust in a close-loop system through first-person narrative as a closed-loop system, or separate from the target system, or administrate trust questions through third-person narrative. Limitation for the conversational measurement approach is that it is not suitable for all conditions, such as high workload, limited time window for administration, or when auditory channel is blocked.
Using the prompts generated following the process in this paper, we will conduct a study involving resource management and negotiation with a conversational agent. The generated conversational exchanges between human and agents provide data for extracting and analyzing trust indicators. For the responses decoding and analysis, a threelevel (i.e. micro, meso, macro) analysis by extracting the trust-related responses through the conversations will be conducted. A strategy called triangulation, which uses corroborating evidence from multiple perspectives, can increase confidence in the validity of the trust measurement (Lazar, Feng, Hochheister 2017). The end goal of this novel conversational survey method is to provide an alternative unobtrusive measurement or administrate along with the traditional text-based scales. We hope this new measure can unobtrusively elicit rich and dynamic information on situational trust throughout a human-agent interaction.