Do Biethnic or Biracial People Make Better Employees?

Do biethnic, biracial or bicultural adults make better employees at the workplace? 

This can be an extremely difficult question to research and any conclusions drawn could be rather provocatively over generalistic and even misleading. But the research question - 

"Does a Biethnic Background Provide Advantages in Adapting Socio-culturally to Workplace Norms and Behavioural Skills Requirements?" can give us more precise data.

Photo credit:

The number of biethnic or biracial people, who are children born to parents from different ethnic backgrounds has grown rapidly all over the globe. There are many studies of how biracial or biethnic children and adolescents adapt to their environment where monoethnic people, who are children born to parents from the same ethnic backgrounds are a majority by default.

But there is not much research on how biethnic adults adapt to the workpace.

As a research student at Leicester University, UK I aimed to discover if a biethnic background provides any advantage to a biethnic adult in adapting to the modern international workplace. To make research manageable, once single country was chosen and this was Finland (because I live here).

Finland as a country is very different from a melting pot society like the USA or multiethnic UK. Only about 2% of the Finnish population of 5.2 million are of foreign origin and most of the biethnic people in Finland are in their childhood or youth. So there are not that many biethnic adults in working life in Finland.

How to Find Biethnic Employees in the Workplace?

Photo source:

• The ethnicity of an employee is classified information and may not be known to managers or human resource departments. 
• Biethnicity is not always physically visible and sometimes people don’t talk publicly about their ethnic backgrounds. 

This makes finding biethnic adults at the workplace very difficult. 48,5% of the people contacted, i.e., fourteen biethnic adults working in different organisations were located through snowballing technique and semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted.

The interviewees evaluated their own adaptation to the norms and behavioural requirements of their current organisation and also contrasted their own adaptation with how they saw monoethnic colleagues adapted to the same workplace.


Three main findings of the Biethnic Adult Workplace Adaptation Research:

1. Biethnic adults adapt well to the international workplace in Finland, from their own perspective and also when they contrast their own adaptation to that of the monoethnic majority in the workplace.
2. Biethnicity or a bicultural background and other factors affect how biethnic adults adapt to the workplace in Finland. 
3. Being biethnic or bicultural gives a unique perspective but personality traits, skills, motivation, individual life circumstances, and most importantly the interplay with others at the workplace play a greater role in the adaptation process.

Photo source:
Measuring the Socio-Cultural Adaptation of Employees

How can the socio-cultural adaptation of employees at the workplace be measured? This is not very easy as there are many subjective components involved here. Some of the following criteria affect this issue of adaptation significantly.

• What is understood by adaptation?
• How do people define their own identities?
• Do the terms biethnic, biracial and bicultural mean different things or do they get mixed up in the usage?
• Is one person's ethnic or cultural identity externally visible or easily apparent and recognised?
• Does the person consider adjustment, adaptation to the workplace as a desirable state of affairs?
• Are the persons own criteria for success of adaptation the same as other peoples' criteria?
• How does one know that one has 'successfully' adapted?

Photo source:

Many even large organisations in Finland do not have any measures for facilitating the socio-cultural adaptation of employees by focussing on norms and behavioural skills requirements, though they regularly have normative systems for inducting new employees by guiding them through work processes, organisational systems, practical facilities and task requirements. 


People From Biethnic Backgrounds Adjust Well Socially 


Yes, people from biethnic backgrounds adjust well socially, there is no indication that their adaptation is anyway faulty or less successful.

Photo credit:

Barack Obama, the eloquent president of the USA has now become a glorious mascot for biethnic people as highly successful and able individuals, who rise and succeed against many odds.

Successful socio-cultural adaptation to the workplace or organisational socialization is a very complex process dependant on many variables and the research subjects confirm this. The findings of this research, however, stand out in stark contrast to some earlier adaptation literature, which suggested that offspring from mixed marriages adjust badly socio-culturally.

What is the Message of Biethnicity Research for Organisations?

The working environment in our world has become more demanding and stressful, though many things have consistently improved over the decades. 

Management and human resource functions have become aware of the great importance of systematic and well-planned measures to manage talent in organisations. 

Photo source:

The biethnicty workplace adaptation research findings suggest that organisations should consider integrating norms and behavioural skills requirements into strategies for improving organisational socialization of employees in addition to task and process induction commonly used in organisations.

More details of biethnicity workplace adaptation research here

Some other places where this news reported by different media can be found:

Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News

Leicester University press release

Science Mode

Physorg.com

Wall Street Journal

Science News

EuroGraduate


I will be continuing research on the same theme some day towards a doctoral degree.

Are Finns Ethnocentric?

Recently on a visit to India, some people who regularly deal with Finns asked me to explain why Finns are ethnocentric. 

"You live in Finland and should be able to give us some insight" 

This question was put to me. This is tough! Now, having lived in Finland more than 25 years, I have no desire to badmouth Finland and still need to find an intelligent insight.

Historically small nations tend to be ethnocentric. But is ethnocentrism still valid in a modern context? The term ethnocentrism is often based on the premise of racial superiority over other races/ethnicities.

Are Finns Ethnocentric and Isolated?

In the old days, Finns mostly kept to themselves as you can expect from a people living on the edge of Europe in a mostly harsh climate. But today, Finland has become a rapidly evolving society embracing many diverse cultures and on the way to becoming global.

Photo source:

The facts are a bit problematic in describing ethnic diversity. In 2010: 

• 2.7% of Finland's residents were foreign citizens (EU average 6.4%). 
• In Iceland, 7.6% of the population were born abroad. 
• The majority of foreign-born people come to Finland from neighbouring Estonia (18.6%), Russia (16.2%) and Sweden (4.6%). The Estonians are working in Finland and going back home while Russians settle in and get citizenship five times more often.

'Finnish ethnocentrism' is actually a misnomer and ethnocentrism is highly misleading in the context of Finns in these days. The choice of deciding to remain strictly on their own as a socio-economic-political policy has become a minority opinion in Finland. 

The majority of Finns have actually the opposite sentiment as they feel that they are tucked away in a tiny sparsely populated country far away from the centre stage of the world. There is a fervent desire to catch up and not be seen as a peripherial culture. Many a Finn would quip 

“We don’t have much culture, we just came out of the woods recently”.

Now this is not meant to be taken literally, but should be understood as self-irony, which characterises Finnish humour. 

A Finn and a Norwegian would joke that in spite of very different languages and cultures, they have at least one thing in common; a challenging neighbour to the east. 

You can actually discover people of Finnish origin almost anywhere on the globe. Whether they learn Hindi and Marathi and blend in downtown Mumbai or live in Patagonia, Argentina as sheep farmers, you can recognize them, if not from anything else, from their names at least. Typically Finns are also rather self-effacing and try to be modest yet friendly, but there are some exceptions. 

Photo source:


One does run into an arrogant and high-nosed Finn occasionally, of both gender and among all age groups. 

In Finland, there is even a right-wing political party called Perussuomalaiset. This party is anti-immigration, anti-EU though they are not as extreme as the neo-Nazis. This party is probably going to get stronger over the years and become a decisive factor in politics one day.

Photo source

Finns are unique people because of their geography, history and challenging climate and especially how all these have shaped their character.

Challenges Foreigners Experience with Finns

Photo source: 

People having interactions with Finns report that the following are the challenges plaguing foreigners’ attempts to have smooth dealings or settle down to a “lived happily ever after” life in Finland.

• Scant communication, where silence is no embarrassment but a virtue
• Finns prefer to communicate by e-mail or sms messaging. People divorce and are even fired in Finland by sms messages
• Difficulty in making friends with Finns – it might take years as Finns are slow to warm up to new people and show emotions
• Seemingly linear way of thinking. Almost always you have agendas at meetings, start at the beginning with no chit chat at all and finish at the end
• Management by ‘Perkele’ – a very distinct and dogged no-nonsense result oriented management style which ruffles feathers easily
• Challenging climate for most of the year – excepting the short summer, either too wet or too cold and damp or getting a lot of what the British railways called “the wrong kind of snow” in 1991, to explain the occasional slight delays
• There is almost no communal ritual moaning at the workplace so vital and essentially British and also found in most other cultures. The ritual of going out with colleagues and engaging in boss-bashing tongue wagging with a beer is hardly practised in Finland. Finns make up for this at the once yearly Pikkujoulut or Christmas party where scandals to last the whole year might take place.
• Things tend to run quiet and smooth so restless foreigners either get bored or depressed feeling “Nothing ever happens here”. 

So, the answer is 'it depends!' - the Finns are ethnocentric in some contexts while being very global and eager to mix in other contexts.