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First Nations Canadians are in a unique cultural context, with values resulting from both traditional, heritage influences and Eurocentric Canadian influences. Different patterns of endorsing heritage versus mainstream values have resulted. This research examined leadership preferences in First Nations individuals. Linking acculturation patterns to descriptors of leadership attributes that enhance or inhibit outstanding leadership, characteristics of leadership prototypes were developed for members of four acculturative strategy groups. These leadership prototypes were then compared with existing academic leadership theories.

Questioning, seeking information and understanding, and ultimately learning, always occurs within a context, and that context affects what questions are asked, how information and understanding are sought, and ultimately, what learning occurs. Knowing the place, the time, and the people involved in any quest for understanding is to know more about how the learning took place and how new understandings were developed. The larger context for the lessons from research that was facilitated through the Sharing Knowledge-Building Relationships: Aboriginal Experiences in the Cross-Cultural Workplace gathering reported elsewhere in this volume (Adair, Kwantes, Stonefish, Badea, & Weir, this volume) is important to consider as it shaped the questions, methods and learning. Personal experiences and societal context prompt questions, inform seeing, and impact understanding. This article, therefore, seeks to set the context for the information shared at this 2 day gathering with a focus on Aboriginal experiences in the workplace, setting the stage for understanding the time and the place for the learning that took place, by explicating the societal context, the location, and the activities of this event.

The authors relate how they reflected upon, understood, and shared conversations about Aboriginal experiences at work across time and with different audiences. They found nuances in their understanding and interpretation as their audience changed from sharing circle members, to Cando conference attendees, and finally the Academy. Whereas initial impressions highlighted concepts of strength and resilience, which the authors translated into practical recommendations for mentorship and cultural safety, the results from an academic analysis highlighted how conversational focus changed when participants discussed work experiences in the past (systemic barriers emphasized), present (Indigenous worldviews emphasized), and future (all concepts discussed equally). The authors offer suggestions for continuing the conversation and new ways of understanding Indigenous employees' experiences at work.

First Nations Canadians are in a unique cultural context, with values resulting from both traditional, heritage influences and Eurocentric Canadian influences. Different patterns of endorsing heritage versus mainstream values have resulted. This research examined leadership preferences in First Nations individuals. Linking acculturation patterns to descriptors of leadership attributes that enhance or inhibit outstanding leadership, characteristics of leadership prototypes were developed for members of four acculturative strategy groups. These leadership prototypes were then compared with existing academic leadership theories.

Growing attention to the importance of employee psychological health has resulted in increased attention to its determinants and a growing desire to understand the psychosocial mechanisms through which employee psychological safety can be facilitated. Psychological safety is defined as employees’ taken-for-granted beliefs regarding the safety of engaging in interpersonal risk-taking, such that employees believe that they are free to express thoughts and concerns without fear of judgment or reprisal. The review focused on three important organizational constructs which have fueled considerable empirical research, largely to the exclusion of each other: psychological safety, person-environment fit, and trust. The research study adopted a perception-based focus and explored these constructs at the individual level of analysis. Specifically, this research examined the relation between individual perceptions of: perceived demographic similarity, person-environment fit (with the organization, leader, and coworkers) and psychological safety. Furthermore, this study sought to understand how trust impacts these relationships. A theoretically grounded conceptual model was advanced. Although psychological safety has been examined at multiple levels of analysis, and has been examined most commonly as a team-level construct, numerous researchers have argued that more work must be done to identify antecedents to psychological safety and to understand how employees come to feel psychologically safe at work. That is, without individuals perceiving they are psychologically safe in their work environment, there cannot be an aggregated perception of psychological safety at the team level. So while team level perceptions represent a climate of psychological safety in the workplace, the perceptions of such necessarily originate at the individual level. Determining the mechanisms through which individual’s come to perceive they are psychologically safe has both theoretical and practical merit through the potential to fuel future research with respect to creating environments and organizational cultures that facilitate more macro-level experiences of psychological safety. Data were collected from 827 participants using the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowd sourcing platform. Three path models were tested to evaluate the proposed associations between the variables for each of the three referents (organization, leader, and coworker). The results of the path analysis indicated that the proposed model showed excellent model fit to the data for each of the three referents and the model strongly suggested pathways from perceived fit (organization, leader and coworker) to perceptions of psychological safety. The data also supported significant indirect effects of perceived fit to perceptions of psychological safety through the corresponding trust referents. It may be inferred from this finding that not only does perceived fit contribute to perceptions of psychological safety, but trust also plays an integral role in the relationship processes necessary for employees to perceive they are safe to express themselves in the organizational context. This finding contributes to an understanding of the mechanisms that may lead to the development of perceptions of psychological safety in the workplace and has the potential to fuel future research focused on the development of organizational processes to facilitate psychological safety across other levels of analysis. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The social landscape has changed regarding public knowledge, perception, and acceptance of “alternative” sexual lifestyles. In recent years, public and political discourse around issues of non-heterosexual orientations has shifted significantly. Despite many legal milestones, society has not realized complete inclusion of individuals whose sexual orientations do not conform to the mainstream, heterosexual majority. Non-heterosexual Canadians still experience negative repercussions of heterosexism in both social and institutional realms. This article discusses one important avenue of advocacy—gay–straight alliances—and takes the position that these alliances serve a dual role: education and social activism

This study examined the relationship among implicit leadership preferences, values, and acculturation (heritage/mainstream) from a Native Canadian perspective (N = 103), testing the following hypotheses: Worldviews will predict degree of acculturation; degree of acculturation will correlate with a preference for leadership styles; worldviews will predict leadership preference; and acculturation mediates the relationship between values and leadership preferences. The results revealed that this sample strongly endorses heritage culture, but also maintains strong connections to mainstream society; however, cultural associations were predicted by different values. A preliminary examination of the value structure and acculturative strategies of this sample provides insight into Native worldviews beyond anecdotes and speculation. These findings support implicit leadership theory showing that implicit ideas of leadership can vary in different contexts, in addition to supporting bidimensional models of acculturation. Implications, limitations and future research directions are discussed.