CIICPD 2023

2022), sports (Sieglová, 2022d) or travel led to a description of the Critical Incident Cycle (CIC) (Sieglová, 2023) as a multidisciplinary didactic model distinguishing between the reactive and reflective phase on the emotional, cognitive and behavioural level. This approach helped to shed light on the role of role models in the student lives (Sieglová, 2022c) as one of the leading themes emanating from the data applicable to corporate leadership. A team of trainers, led by Dagmar Sieglová, together with Miluše Löffelmannová, Vladimíra Soukupová and Lenka Stejskalová in cooperation with Jan Kotík from the Škoda Auto company (see Chapter 2) then focused on CIs as situations of unconscious biases and stereotypical behaviours experienced and shared by managers of varied levels of seniority in a series of the company’s diversity management training courses. While adapting the CIC model to recognise the training participants’ first-hand reactions as a set of emotional, cognitive and behavioural levels and contrast them with their follow-up metacognitive and meta-behavioural reflections, the CI analyses helped to describe the diversity management dynamics in the corporate practice, significantly contributing to an optimal use of the potential of the company diverse workforce. Scholars from the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria in Hagenberg draw upon their continuing work in the area of diversity management explored in various settings. Their framework capturing Higher Education Awareness for Diversity – the HEAD Wheel – earlier proposed by Gaisch and Aichinger (2016) and further revisited and explored to lay down a holistic view on diversity management in higher education settings has been accepted as a practical tool allowing for integration of varied interconnected situational and procedural elements ever since (Gaisch et al., 2017; Gaisch et al., 2019). By recognising the demographic, cognitive, disciplinary, functional and institutional dimension in each person’s background, the framework is established as useful in studying the complexity of CIs in a university-sensitive contexts. Correspondingly, Gaisch (2019) proposed a combination of the HEAD Wheel framework with the four step process of Description, Interpretation, Verification and Explanation, known as the DIVE Strategy (Brewer and Cunningham, 2009; Downey et al., 2012), as a functional teaching strategy to analyse and reflect on cultural differences and unconscious biases derived from learned ideas and value systems and manage diversity in university contexts and beyond. Drawing upon Fiedler et al. (1970) and Thomas’ (1993) definition of CIs as encounters with varied barriers, misunderstandings or conflictual, irritating or puzzling situations, Martina Gaisch and Victoria Rammer (see Chapter 3) then argue that this combination can contribute to the research in the area of CIs with a more holistic and systematic approach. Research in the area of CIs in Italy is relatively young and reflects the geopolitical reality of the country. Formed by intensifying labour migration processes, multiculturalism unbinds the interplay between traditional and imported values and significantly redefines the conditions of the Italian job market as a result. To mediate the interaction between the majority and minority groups, existing studies, therefore, tend to examine CIs as disruptive events from everyday business activities with undesired outcomes shaped by diversity. Inspired by Toporek’s works (Toporek et al., 2004), which analysed multicultural supervision in counselling practice and Njoku (2015), who pursued brand-switching behaviour through an analysis of interaction between banking

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