Cultural Diversity in the Workplace Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Cultural Diversity in the Workplace - Essay Example Managing cultural diversity in workplace is one of the key objectives of the organization among other concern areas of sustaining productivity as well as quality, total quality management and customer satisfaction. The diversity in the workforce is mainly due to presence of people coming from varying set of backgrounds. They differ in their value systems, culture, beliefs, attitude and behaviour, habits and customs (Henderson, 1994). Thus to bring the entire workforce together on the same platform is extremely significant in terms of bringing them to a common tune of work. The integration of a workforce which is culturally diversified lies at the beneath of the long term success of the organization. The issues to be considered for managing people from an environment of cross-culture are training and development of the employees, organizational dynamics aimed at optimizing the performance of the global managers. The building of confidence to bring out the professionalism of manager ar riving from an international scenario is important. The adaptability to the home environment is required to work in harmony with the organization policies which could be achieved through managing the cultural diversity of the workforce. ... The strategies adopted by organizations are solely based on the data collected by the organizations on the personal trends, labour segments and customer segments. The analysis of the collected data helps the management to understand about the thought process of the diversified set of employees on the developments and progress of the organization. The attitude of the workforce towards their business opportunities and growth could be analyzed from the information collected by the organizations. For international operations, a diversified set of employees in the workforce could prove to be advantageous. The alignment to the different set of cultures, understanding the needs of customers from varying cultural backgrounds and addressing those needs with the help of employees from specific cultural backgrounds help the organizations to attain expansion in the world markets and also to get a competitive advantage. The strategies for managing cultural diversity of the workforce in an organiz ation vary with respect to the ethno-centric, region centric as well as geocentric approaches (Walton, 1994). The ethnocentric approach considers people from different ethnic backgrounds. The region-centric approach considers the members of the workforce from different regional backgrounds. The geocentric approach takes the people from all over the world into consideration for managing the diversity of people from cross-cultural backgrounds. In the present scenario of business expansions, the integration of the host with the international markets and culture is extremely important for the good interest of the organization. The attainment of cultural diversity in business operations is obvious under such situations. Thus the management of cultural diversity is also