The Importance Of Cultural Diversity In The Workplace

Cultural diversity is a unique addition in organizations today; the increase in globalization has brought forth challenges in understanding and training towards proper cultural diversity management. Cultural diversify has brought many benefits in organizations throughout the workforce; this is done by delivering vast opinions and knowledge from a multicultural community of workers. In this paper diversity will be defined, and to further understand the role it plays in our organizations. To understand further, a discussion on the benefits of cultural diversity, policies and regulations, framework of human resource diversity management, and necessary training needed to fully understand and provided equality in the workplace will be illustrated.

Grivastava et al. (2015) in their research article on Managing Cultural Diversity in the Workplace provided an example on the importance of diversity in the workforce. The research illustrated that IBM was amongst one of the top companies in hiring women engineers, in result the company had immediately noticed an increase of patents acquired by the company. This illustration didn’t argue that women were better engineers, but it argued that the multicultural perspectives of women in the company’s engineering team brought about more innovation from the company. From the past information and decision making theories according to Choi & Rainey, (2010) suggest that cultural diversity in the workforce delivers performance by contributing to quality decisions and by taking advantage of a more complex range of alternatives and new ideas. By managing diversity in an organization of people with different background tend to engage and share information better, leading to greater achievements and performance in their organization (Choi et al., 2010). Again to re-illustrate, different opinions can bring diverse ways to think and process ways to solve a problem, and deliver innovation and

According to Bean (2008) recent consultation with industry leaders commissioned by the Australian National Training Authority identified several trends and issues for the next national strategy for vocational education, all of which are influenced by equity and diversity dimensions. These are: “need for a renewed commitment to equity and diversity, globalization and the growth of global markets, increased customer service expectations, increased attention towards economic and social policy.” Training and professional development is essential, beginning with pre-service training and continuing with in-service training, mentoring, and coaching. Managers and support staff alike need to understand how to apply the principles and practices of equity and diversity management to service planning, delivery and support (Bean, 2008). Grivastava et al. (2015) explained that Coca Cola has diversity training; the company utilizes diversity speakers, and training on supplier diversity so employees could understand about business with minority suppliers. Diversity training is an essential topic that needs to be added to all organizations agenda of employee training, so they can be informed with different aspects of dealing with a