Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Muhammad, Rabiah SaharaSubject: search.filters.subject.Organizational behavior

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    THE ETHNIC ETHICAL LEADER: HOW PERCEPTIONS OF A LEADER'S ETHNICITY AND GENDER ALTER PERCEPTIONS OF THEIR ETHICALITY
    (2014) Muhammad, Rabiah Sahara; Hanges, Paul J; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The present dissertation examines the role of ethnicity and gender on perceptions of a leaders' ethicality. Based on the literature of social information processing, people are recognized as leaders when the content of a perceiver's prototype matches the target's characteristics, attributes, and behaviors (CABs). With this dissertation, I add to the existing literature by testing whether categorizing someone as a leader is associated with perceptions of their ethicality. The goal of this dissertation is to examine if the most salient leadership CABS reported in the extant leadership literature are those that may be more consistent with stereotypes of White males than other demographic groups. I hope to examine if leaders may be perceived as less ethical as a function of their race or gender due to a mismatch between the perceiver's leadership prototype and the target's leadership CABs. Four studies were conducted to investigate these issues, with a focus on perceptions of leader's ethicality. In Study 1, participants generated the necessary CABS to describe leaders of different ethnicities, genders and contexts and rated these CABS on how much they fit with the idea of the leader. Study 2 exposed participants to a resume that had a description of a leader that varied in the leader's gender and ethnicity (White, Black, and Hispanic). Study 3 was a within-subject experiment that utilized an implicit assessment of participant's attitudes regarding the ethicality the leaders with an Implicit Attitude Test. In study 4, a between-subject design was used to test the role of context in influencing the salience of the ethnic/gender leadership prototypes. Specifically, the situational context (occupation) and ethnicity (specifically Black) were manipulated and MBA students rated the ethicality of the leader. This dissertation represents the first empirical investigation of leader ethicality through the lens of ethnicity and gender.
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    Bringing along the family: Nepotism in the workplace
    (2011) Muhammad, Rabiah Sahara; Hanges, Paul J; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The current study advances an organizational justice theory to the concept of workplace nepotism. I examined if an individual's perception of nepotism can be influenced by their cultural self-construal and how the different components of organizational justice (distributive, procedural, interactional and informational) provide the psychological mechanism through which they base their judgments of fairness. A 2 (organizational selection: merit, nepotism) X 2 (competence: high, low), X 2 (in-group, out-group) experimental design was be utilized to test this theory. Participants read a randomized vignette, which varied the level of the six important factors. They then completed dependent variables (fairness evaluations and organizational reactions) about each scenario. This study represents the first empirical investigation of nepotism through the lens of individual's cultural self-construal and organizational justice.