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The Development of Intercultural Relationships at Work
Polish Migrant Workers in Finland
Malgorzata Lahti & Maarit Valo
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Introduction
The contemporary workplace is becoming increasingly characterized by nonstandard forms of employment (Ballard and Gossett 2007), which may affect the ways organizational members initiate and develop interpersonal relationships. One such nontraditional work arrangement is that of a foreign migrant worker, its occurrence fuelled by the growing labor shortage in low-status employment sectors experienced by Western states (Castles 2002). In the European context, work-related migration increased considerably when mobility and employment restrictions were lifted for citizens of several East European states upon the EU expansion in 2004 and 2007 (Demireva 2011).
Although hiring foreign migrants to do the so-called '3D (dirty, dangerous and dull) jobs' (Cook, Dwyer and Waite 2011) in industry, construction, low-skilled services or care-giving has become common practice, surprisingly little is known about these people's interpersonal relationships at work. Research into different forms of employment that overlap with that of foreign temporary labor either questions whether migrants form interpersonal workplace relationships at all or presents these ties as dysfunctional. In his discussion on temporary agency work, Tanskanen (2007) comments that the trend objectifies persons by capitalizing on their productivity. The temporary character of employment encourages the use of short-term value communicative strategies, such as engaging in conflict and abusing the other (Ballard and Gossett 2007). Migrants may themselves have few interpersonal interests vested in their foreign workplace since they perceive their stay as temporary (Demireva 2011). The image suggests someone who works hard in the host country but pretends to be living their interpersonal life in their home country, maintaining constant contact with family and friends. Indeed, the growing body of literature on communication practices of migrant workers (e.g. Uy-Tioco 2007) is mostly preoccupied with migrants' use of communication technologies to stay in touch with their intimates and stand up against their subjection in the country of employment.
We believe that the theme of relationship building in a workplace with temporary foreign employees warrants a scientific inquiry. In this article, we want to fill the apparent research gap by offering an interpersonal communication perspective on relational processes in a workplace affected by the international flow of labor migration. Our goal is...