No abstract

Refugees suffer from a stigmatized identity portraying them as weak, unskilled victims. We developed a brief (~10-min) intervention that reframed refugees’ identity as being, by its very nature, a source of strength and skills. Reading and writing exercises, provided by a university, highlighted how refugees’ experiences helped them acquire skills such as perseverance and the ability to cope with adversity, which could help them succeed in a new country. In Experiment 1 ( N = 93), the intervention boosted refugees’ (a) confidence in their ability to succeed at an imagined university and (b) challenge seeking: Participants were 70% more likely to take on an academic exercise labeled as difficult. In Experiment 2, the intervention, delivered to refugees entering an online university ( N = 533), increased engagement in the online-learning environment by 23% over the subsequent year. There was also evidence of greater course completion. It is possible to reframe stigmatized individuals’ identity as inherently strong and resourceful, helping them put their strengths to use.

No abstract

Prior research suggests that the organizational context supports the emergence of employee ambidexterity; however, the interplay between formal and informal context has been largely unexplored. We analyze this interplay with a multilevel, multi-source data set of 2,446 individual employees nested in 77 organizations. We find that a promotion climateunlike a prevention climatecontributes to employee ambidexterity. In addition, formalization positively moderates the effects of both promotion and prevention climate on employee ambidexterity, while centralization weakens the positive effect of promotion climate. Our results advance a contingency perspective that brings together formal and informal contextual drivers of employee ambidexterity and shows that even though an informal climate signals the preferred manner of goal pursuit, a formal structure affects the impact of such signals by delineating opportunity corridors of admissible behaviors.