Person-Environment Fit in Ghanaian Banks (PDF)

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 [...]