Employees’ mindset matters: Leveraging cultural mindset to harness the benefits of organizational polyculturalism

[...]as Valenzuela and Bernardo suggested, multiculturalism’s basic tenets do not involve the assumptions that cultures have to be separate and fixed, and yet it often and unintendedly implied and results in a message that different cultures as separate and unchanging (potentially inducing fixed cultural mindset as a mechanism). [...]cultural mindset and diversity ideology operate at different levels of analysis. Whereas diversity ideology is an organization-level construct describing the prescribed approach of policy and appropriate behavior within an organization, cultural mindset is personal—it resides in individuals’ personal belief system. [...]as employees with a more malleable cultural mindset have more positive attitudes toward other cultures, they may also proactively seek opportunities to form intercultural connections (e.g., crafting their jobs to learn new knowledge from colleagues from other cultures). Because these two processes take different approaches (top down vs. bottom up) but can complement each other, we suggest that diversity ideologies and cultural mindset can work in conjunction to create positive intercultural outcomes. [...]although polyculturalism can have positive workplace benefits in theory, its fit with individual employees’ cultural mindset needs to be carefully considered.