Me and we: Priming of OFW\u27s self-construal and its effects on attributional bias and conflict management styles in the workplace

Among the many challenges Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) experience abroad include the conflicts they encounter in a multicultural work environment. This type of exposure eventually developed their ability to shift between different cultural mind frames, such as the independent and interdependent self-construals. Given this ability, their self-construals may be cognitively primed. The study applied the dynamic constructivist approach (Hong & Morris, 2000) and made use of a mixed method design. The quantitative phase investigated how cognitively priming the self-construals of OFWs affect their attributional biases and conflict management styles in the multicultural work environment. On the other hand, the qualitative phase sought to elaborate more on the quantitative phase by citing concrete experiences of OFWs. The study generally found that OFWs use contextual attributions and conflict management styles of yielding, compromising and problem-solving mainly because they endorse more an interdependent self-construal regardless of cognitive priming