Diversity Challenges and Organizational Cynicism: A study on Egyptian Physicians

Abstract

As a result of globalization and interactions of people with various identities, cultural diversity has become a noticeable norm in today's business life. Accordingly, managing such cultural diversity requires a dependence on a much more tolerant culture in which employees seek to attain both career and organizational objectives without being hurdled by irrelevant factors of religion, race, ethnicity and so on. During the last two decades, organizational cynicism has found a place in academic management literature. It has a vital role in interpreting many organizational unwanted behaviors such as: absenteeism, day dreaming and the state of being careless when doing work. This study investigates the association between cultural diversity challenges and organizational cynicism dimensions by conducting a quantitative study of physicians in Kasr El Eini public hospital in Egypt. Upon using correlation and regression analysis for the collected data, it appears that not all cultural diversity challenges have a negative impact on organizational cynicism dimensions.

Examining the role of employee engagement in the relationship between organisational cynicism and employee performance

“…Similarly, Abugre (2017) found that employees' satisfaction can be increased through effective interpersonal interactions and engagement that will help in reducing OC at workplace. It was also evident from previous studies that EE matters within an organisation, on the one hand, and that disengaged employees, on the other hand, increased costs for an organisation due to high absenteeism (Mousa, 2017a), lower productivity and high turnover of staff (Saari and Judge, 2004;Truss et al, 2013).…”

“…Moreover, there are authors who argue that Diogenes was the founder of cynicism and had no links with Antisthenes whatsoever (Sayer, 1945). OC is closely related to other constructs that include work alienation, job satisfaction, trust, EP, burnout and psychological contract violation (Dean et al , 1998; Johnson and O’Leary-Kelly, 2003; Storm and Rothmann, 2003; Yildiz and Şaylikay, 2014; Simha et al , 2014; Nicholson et al , 2014; Delken, 2004; Mousa, 2017a, b). Job satisfaction, as an attitudinal variable, is confined to a particular setting where the employee performs tasks and is revealed only in the responses that arise immediately from these task settings.…”

“…Nevertheless, employee retention has become a major concern for many organisations (Hausknecht et al , 2009) around the globe, specifically in the health care sector in which there is a shortage of qualified personnel (Hayes et al , 2006) in many countries (Mantler et al , 2015) including Pakistan (Abdullah et al , 2014). Employee retention is perceived as cost effective and a sign of organisational health (Duffield et al , 2011); however, some employees exhibit withdrawal behaviours such as lateness, increased absenteeism, day dreaming (Mousa, 2017a), ebbed sustenance for organisational initiatives and abridged work effort that can be very costly (Sagie et al , 2002). These passive withdrawal behaviours may have an underlying commonality in employee cynicism.…”

“…In conclusion to above discussion, it can be documented that OC needs to be addressed to increase performance, retention of employees and sustainability of organisation. Though, cynicism has become the subject of various disciplines in social sciences; for example, management, religion, philosophy, political science, sociology and psychology (Ivancevich and Matteson, 2002; Helm et al , 2015; Rose et al , 2017; Nicholson et al , 2014) and researchers have investigated various dimensions of OC and, in the organisational context; different models have been developed for studying OC (Rose et al , 2017; Mantler et al , 2015; Yildiz and Şaylikay, 2014; Cartwright and Holmes, 2006; Stanley et al , 2005; Cole et al , 2006) in developed countries; however, few studies have been conducted to investigate the impact of OC on EE and performance in developing countries (Leung et al , 2010; Hussami, 2008; Mousa, 2017a, b) especially in Pakistan (Bashir, 2011; Aamir and Sohail, 2006; Aslam et al , 2015; Hussami, 2008). The current study fills this gap in the existing literature by investigating the effect of OC on employees’ performance and also examines the moderating effect of EE on the relationship between OC and employee performance (EP) among employees of teaching hospitals of Pakistan.…”