Abstract
Abstract This article investigated the organizational integration of refugees from the experience of company managers in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. A basic qualitative research was developed, based on interpretative paradigm assumptions, and the data were collected through a semi-structured interview applied to five managers in charge of refugees in their workplace. The interviews data underwent qualitative content analysis. The results showed potential integration benefits, such as experience sharing, new talents, gratitude, engagement, improvements in the company’s reputation, productivity, creativity, and organizational development from the inclusion of new languages. However, factors such as language, diploma revalidation, skill limitation, and low schooling levels were seen as obstacles to efficient integration. The research also found that employers are highly dependent on voluntary assistance from organizations for hiring and integrating refugees, which indicates that, without the presence of these mediators, the possibilities of recruiting the refugee workforce may be affected. The study contributes to broadening the discussion on the organizational integration of refugees, a topic that is still little explored in the field of administration. It also intends to awaken in managers a more sensitive view about people in a situation of refuge and how their effective integration can impact their businesses and individuals.
Highlights
The issue on refuge has faced its biggest challenge since the Second World War (Balcilar & Nugent, 2018), having reached unprecedented proportions in the past few years
From the evidences found in the interviews done with the managers, it was possible to see several factors associated to refugee’s work in Brazilian companies, such as enthusiasm, commitment, pro-activity, willingness, talent diversity, opportunity valuation, gratitude and appreciation
We ask a few things from the Brazilian employees and, and they will drag their feet and say they can’t do it, which is something I never expect from our employee who is a refugee
Summary
The issue on refuge has faced its biggest challenge since the Second World War (Balcilar & Nugent, 2018), having reached unprecedented proportions in the past few years. Going against negative evidences on the refugees’ integration, studies have pointed out the potential benefits from hiring a refugee, such as the tendency to less absenteeism levels (Dench, Hurstfield & Hill, 2006), the fact they are more productive (Ruhs et al, 2011), more satisfied (Spijkerman, Benschop & Bücker, 2018), have skills and competencies that complement those of professionals from the host countries (Münz, Straubhaar & Vadean, 2006), have attitude and ethics at work to the extent that, in some cases, they are noticed by their employers as professionals who are more reliable and grateful that the natives themselves (Hussein, Manthorpe & Stevens, 2010), have wealth of knowledge and experience sharing, which come from linguistic and cultural diversity (Urick, 2017), consumer market expansion, are creative and able to contribute to innovation (Manoharan, Sardeshmukh & Gross, 2019), present skills with other languages, more tolerance to diversity, gratitude and confidence in their work (Archer et al, 2005; Hussein et al, 2010; Ponzoni, Ghorashi & Van Der Raar, 2017), and contribute positively to the organizational performance (Gomez & Bernet, 2019) These findings point out to the importance of creating policies which aim at overcoming refugees’ inclusion obstacles in the organizations. One of its several pillars is the incentive for companies to hire trainee refugees in order to speed up their inclusion process in the country (Alaraj et al, 2018)
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