Concept And Meaning Of Cultural Diversity

2.1 Concept and Meaning of Cultural Diversity

With respect to organizational diverse workforce, cultural diversity involves differences in gender, age, color, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, disability, education, personality, and skills (Lashley & Lee-Ross, 2003). Issues of diversity involve attributes that are harder to identify and which can be defined after knowing the employee for a longer period of time, such as attitudes, values, traditions and principles (Lashley et al. 2003; Schein, 2004; Kreitner & Kinicki, 2008).

To begin with, diversity can be divided into primary and secondary differences. Primary differences are stable factors that are distinguished by individuals, for example age, gender and racial background (Clements & Jones, 2006). These internal dimensions are basic factors that individuals live on a daily basis and define personality. Secondary differences may tremendously alter, such as religious beliefs, class, education and experience. A final layer of diversity is associated with the organizational context as intimated by Gardenswartz and Rowe (2009) that relates

Cross-cultural challenges arise from cultural gaps. As the industry grows, opportunities for misinterpretation and misunderstanding of workforce and customer needs can be enhanced (Rosinski, 2003). In order to avoid cultural tensions and frustration and successfully deal with multicultural employees, hospitality industry people must recognize and understand the importance of cultural differences in meeting diverse coworkers’ and tourists’ needs. However, there are a great amount of challenges in terms of cultural diversity which organizations should regulate and not just terminate. Racism, sexism, ageism, and homophobia are great challenging factors in culturally diverse contexts which prohibit corporate teams from achieving their goals (Sonnenschein,