Asa Framework

In recent years businesses in the United States are becoming more diverse places in which to work. Workforce diversity with respect to race, gender, and ethnicity has increased as result of socio-cultural changes, and is to some extent protected by law. While demographic diversity in American businesses has become more apparent, a range of individual differences in the values, attitudes, beliefs, and personalities of their employees is assumed to have existed for some time. However Benjamin Schneider, a psychology professor at the University of Maryland, argues that the range of individual differences in the above mentioned psychological variables becomes less common within businesses over time.

Schneider has proposed an attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) framework to explain how organizations behave (440). The main proposition of Schneider’s work is that businesses do not determine behavior. Instead employees determine the company culture. Attraction to a company, selection by it, and attrition from it yield particular kinds of persons within a company. These people determine organizational behavior (Scheneider,1987).

From 1997 to 1999 I was employed with a company named TNA North America. This was a company based out of Sydney-Australia, dedicated to selling and servicing packaging equipment to various customers in North America. At this company we all had very similar values, attitudes and beliefs. One of the employees who was very different from the rest of us was the general sales manager. He was different from rest of us in many ways. TNA North America is well known for servicing well to its customers, and all of us at TNA were very used to work ten or twelve hours each day to make sure our customer’s needs were satisfied. In the other hand was the sales manager who only worked six to seven hours each day, and very often did not go to the office for days. Business travel is a big portion of the company budget, therefore we always got the most economical plane tickets. The sales manager was known for flying first class and spending lots of company funds during trade shows, customer visits and conferences. This behavior was just not acceptable to the rest of the company.

He came to work for us from a company that was our competitor, and he came with good references and showed an extensive knowledge about the industry. During his first 6 months he tried to get along with the rest of the employees, and he also tried to get some projects going with different customers.