Assignment task:
John Buckingham, The New Guy On The Job
When John Buckingham moved across the country to take a new job, he didn't expect to run into much difficulty. He would be doing the same kind of work he was used to doing, just for a new company. But when he arrived on his first day, he realized there was more for him to adjust to than he had realized.
Clearly, John had moved to a region where the culture was much more laid back and casual than he was used to. He showed up for his first day in his usual business suit only to find that almost all the other employees wore jeans, Western shirts, and cowboy boots. Many of them merely stared awkwardly when they first saw John, and then hurriedly tried to look busy while avoiding eye contact.
John got the message. On his second day at work John also wore jeans and a casual shirt, although he didn't yet own a pair of cowboy boots. He found that people seemed more relaxed around him, but that they continued to treat him warily. It would be several weeks-after he'd gone out and bought boots and started wearing them to work-before certain people warmed up to John enough to even talk to him.
Q1. Discuss the behavior of John's co-workers toward John suggest about their attributions for his initial manner of dress.
Q2. Discuss the kinds of biases that might have affected John's co-workers as they formed impressions of him on his first day, whether they could have been using a faulty schema to understand him and if there is evidence of the halo effect.
Q3. Discuss why John changed his manner of dress so soon after starting his new job, and the processes likely involved in his decision to do so.
Q4. John's co-workers seemed very hesitant to "warm up" to John. Discuss and explain their initial reluctance to like him very much.
Q5. If you were the human resources director for this company, discuss strategies you could employ to prevent experiences like John's, and discuss justifying the implementation of these strategies to the company president.