Visible Minority Immigrants’ Attributions of Workplace Incivility

Abstract

The immigration of visible minorities to Canada is expected to continuously rise over the coming years. However, discrimination continues to be a challenge for many immigrants in Canada. The present research aims to better understand how visible minority immigrants make sense of a specific, subtle, and insidious form of interpersonal discrimination: incivility in the workplace. Drawing from acculturation and attribution theories, I form hypotheses about the relationships between immigrants’ acculturation and attributions of incivility and explore the potential downstream consequences of different attributions on the targets’ well-being. I test my hypotheses using two online studies. The first applies a vignette study design to assess how acculturation influences internal and external attributions and the second uses a recall study design to do the same, while also examining the relationship between attributions and well-being. Across both studies, cultural maintenance significantly predicted external attributions. Cultural adaptation significantly predicted internal attributions of discrimination in Study 1, and neither acculturation dimension significantly predicted well-being. The present research extends previous work on visible minority immigrants’ perceptions of incivility and well-being, while providing practical implications and avenues for future directions.