Haley Unger

Professor Dianne Weinstein

PSY 280

1/23/17

The most important concept from Chapter 1 is multiculturalism. This is because if you

truly want to fully and completely understand industrial/organizational psychology, you must be

able to critically think and understand individuals employed under a business in any

country/culture. It is culture that distinguishes people more than nationality. Different cultures in

the workplace highlight opportunity to bring different meanings and interpretations of an event

or object. However, different cultures also call for more opportunities for misunderstandings or

counterproductive human resource applications. To be even more complex, individuals take on

not only cultures but also sub-cultures as well. Many of these cultures overlap and interact with

each other, causing for more complexity. Thus, we must not only understand the fact that other

cultures do differ from one another, but how they differ as well. We cannot have a “West versus

the Rest” mentality, or else we will never fully encapsulate all that industrial/organizational

psychology has to offer.