Stereotypes, Culture, and Status: Effects for Ongoing Working Relations
As the data presented above show, engineers in different countries had slightly different
ways of working and orienting toward the occupational role of engineer. These differences were
largely the product of different mixings of the kaleidoscopic reservoir of cultural identities
available for them to draw on to construct meaning about their work (Gibbs, 2009a). The Mexica
engineers, at least, used these cultural reservoirs to produce and sustain stereotypes of engineers i
other countries as well as perceptions of how engineers in other countries stereotyped them.
Consequently, our findings suggest that the communicative behaviors that perceived status
differences produce may have important long-term effects on working relations in global
organizations. U.S. engineers in this study noticed that Mexican engineers often told them that
they worked alone, did not follow work guidelines, and refrained from consulting with others