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Reducing prejudice

published April 13, 2010

In his book, Rupert Brown talks about prejudice, its modern forms and how to reduce it. Unfortunately, we encounter different forms of prejudice everywhere, also at work.  Prejudice at the workplace can mean e.g. intergroup conflicts between management and developers. In the book, Mr Brown gives multiple definitions for prejudice: “the holding of derogatory social attitudes or cognitive beliefs, the expression of negative affect, or the display of hostile or discriminatory behaviour towards members of a group on account of their membership of that group”. Contact hypothesis is a way of improving relationships between groups. It is based on four pillars that should be fulfilled in order to reduce prejudice between groups.

Social and institutional support
Those who have authority should set up a framework promoting greater contact.

Acquaintance potential
Contact between groups should have sufficient frequency, duration, and closeness in order to permit the development of meaningful relationships.

Equal status
Contact situation should be arranged so that it forms an equal status between participants.

Co-operation
Both groups should be brought together to work with common, solvable problem. It is important that each group is dependent of the skills available in other group.

Situations where prejudice exists at workplace can be really nasty. A leader should be able to notice if prejudice is emerging and react immediately once noticed. This means that the leaders will have to do “Genchi Genbutsu” (go-and-see for us who do not speak Japanese).

Samuli @ 21:17 (No Comments)

tags: Business, Lean, Social psychology

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