Managing the Hispanic Workforce in the Context of Values, Acculturation, and Identity

Discussions about leading the 21st century workforce must include Hispanics, the largest ethnic group who will account for 80% of the U.S. labor force growth in" the next four decades. In today's multicultural context, leading Hispanic employees requires knowledge of cultural values and how these are related to social identity and acculturation. Within this context, we review research on how Hispanic employees may perceive leadership, organizational justice, teams, and the effect of job factors on motivation. Additionally, we discuss how culturally embedded leadership favors a relational perspective. Paternalistic leadership emphasizes such relational leadership as does the use of interactional justice. Furthermore, differences in attribution styles need to be noted so as to minimize conflict between managers and Hispanic employees. Research also suggests that in teams, Hispanics will emphasize the importance of team maintenance behaviors as well as potentially providing special treatment to in-group members. Finally, extrinsic job factors such as colleagues, benefits, company reputation, and managers will be related to motivation. Nevertheless, all of these factors need to be taken in the context of employees' levels of acculturation and identification with Hispanic ethnicity and values. As employees are more acculturated and have weaker ethnic identification, Hispanics will display cultural values, job characteristic and leadership preferences which are more similar to U.S. majority members. We conclude with a discussion of several managerial implications.