The purpose of creating teams is to solve a problem or issue through the use of diverse ideas and solutions. There are many times in life, whether at work or at school that one will encounter a diverse mix of personalities. Workplace diversity is everywhere, from the small corner business to the fortune 500 company, and is one of the most important challenges facing companies today. This mix of diverse personalities, gender, race, experience, and culture is what makes a team successful. This is an example of a heterogeneous team. On the other hand, a team with the same make-up, or homogeneous, has limitations on creativity, viewpoints and ideas. This paper will look at cultural diversity and demographic characteristics, specifically age, gender, expertise/ experience and how each plays an integral part in the construction of a high performance team. Cultural diversity is an essential piece of the team-building puzzle. As stated earlier, a heterogeneous team usually equals a successful team. A culturally diverse team brings the obvious cultural differences in language, dress and traditions to the table. In addition, less tangible characteristic such as moral values are equally, if not more important. These different methodologies and teachings help influence the team's direction. Persons of Western culture will have a different set of beliefs and methodologies from those of Middle Eastern or Eastern ethnicity. When team members take the time to learn and understand each culture's moral value, the result is a strong team foundation. High performance teams take and incorporate these cultural differences and use these different beliefs and values to attain the team goal. Demographic diversity is necessary for a team to be successful. A high performance team not only has these demographics present within the make-up of the team members, but a high performance team also has the ability to take these distinct characteristics and use these differences for the team's benefit. Each member from a differing demographic characteristic possesses a unique view on various issues. These assorted viewpoints, moral values and beliefs are what help the team broaden their vision and help produce a better result. Creating a team with diverse backgrounds is only the first step to creating a high performance team. If the team's members are not willing to accept differing viewpoints and opinions, than the team is likely to fail. The first two demographic characteristics to be discussed are age and gender. A generation gap between team members creates a wide range of perspectives and is advantageous.
Diversity is the piece that makes the modern workforce so amazingly unique and challenging at the same time. Valuing diversity means creating a work environment that respects and includes differences, recognizing the unique contributions these differences can bring, and maximizing the potential of all employees and the company. In The Loudest Duck, the author describes what often happens when diverse individuals enter the modern diverse workplace. Liswood gives great examples, analogies and shares simple insights into the hardships of bringing people from diverse backgrounds together to accomplish goals. The main emphasis is put on recognizing that diversity strictly by statistics of different races and/or genders present is insufficient.
Diversity plays a major role in society. People tend to perceive one another by their physical appearance. This creates a mindset that may affect one 's path to leadership. Relating physical appearance to the work force the individuals that have a greater physical stature tend to receive more recognition to leadership and power, than shorter individuals. Research is shown that taller people are more successful have higher authority, higher professional status and are projected as leaders.
As the processes and systems used in business have become more complex, teams, not individuals, have become popular in many organizations. Teams are made up of individuals from an organization brought together to solve a problem, improve a process or implement a new process. “A major advantage that a team has over an individual is its diversity of resources and ideas” (Burns, 1995, p. 52). However, this diversity can cause conflict within the team. The success of the team is strongly influenced by the team’s ability to recognize the causes of, manage and resolve conflict.
...e backgrounds, to do business or work together. If, by any chance, this people do not understand each other in terms of cultural backgrounds, the company is at a risk of underperforming. Among other factors, a company’s exceptional performance depends on a favorable relationship among the employees. People from diverse backgrounds often crush on each other at the work place because the frequency of misunderstanding each other is very high. This owes much on prejudice and stereotypes which people hold on those from different backgrounds. It is in such scenarios that the importance of diversity training cannot be underscored. This is due to the fact that diversity training aim at ironing out all the differences emanating from diverse backgrounds and help in establishing impeccable cohesion among all the stakeholders in an organization (Bezrukova, Jehn and Spell 218).
Cultural diversity is increasingly important due to higher globalization and the ease of movement from one industry to another, and throughout the world; organizations that embrace this diversity have been shown to have a better internal culture, higher creativity, better relationships, and resistance to groupthink mentalities (Grivastava & Kleiner, 2015). Diversity is often thought of as ethnic, but diversity can cover things ranging from diverse religious views to different perspectives on how work should be accomplished. Diversity is not a weakness, quite the opposite, diversity can build a competitive advantage for organizations that make the effort to understand and cultivate it. Diversity is increasing, not decreasing, and this is evidenced
Companies such as Buzztronics are leading the way in the global economy because of their dedication to diversity in the workplace. In order to build a diverse and successful workforce, a business needs to recruit, train, and retain capable and talented minorities.
There are several factors that are important if a culturally diverse business team is to flourish and realize its vast potential. Di Stefano and Maznevski (2000) claim that there are three imperative steps to achieving multicultural team success; namely, mapping the team; where the team members need to clearly understand their cultural differences in how they work and view success. This is often led by the team leader. Next, the team must bridge, that is, to communicate with one another, bearing in mind their cultural differences. Finally, the team must integrate, meaning that they bring together these differences and leverage on them to succeed.
The effectiveness of communication in a multi-cultural team is based on the team’s ability to share information and communicate effectively by avoiding cultural barriers, and building trust in professional relationships. • Self-members multicultural awareness • Recognize cultural differences • Understand team’s member backgrounds • Manage self-emotions towards a multi-cultural environment • The ability to take important decisions in a diverse environment In my opinion, I interpret emotional intelligence in a multi-cultural team as how well the team members socialize and get along with others, and the willingness and motivation to work with people from different backgrounds. The essential characteristics of a good leader in a multi-cultural team are: high level of global identity, the ability to integrate members into one team, to create a positive and respectful multi-cultural environment and to communicate effectively A good effective leader develops those around them and recognizes members’ potential and skills. The effectiveness of the leader can be measured as the ability to connect members, the ability to motivate and engage team members to achieve excellence goals. 1.
Recent years, organisation are much more relay on diversity teams to developing products, making decisions and also gain the business success (When and how), therefore diversity team are becoming a very important element for the organisations. In USA, diversity usually refer to demographic characteristics such as age, gender, and ethnicity, however, diversity is not only refer to demographics, it also means the diversity in psychological characteristics like skills, personality, abilities, and education backgrounds (book diversity). Although team diversity leads to some benefits like the positive organisational cooperation, share the knowledge and experience, it can also leads some problems to the organisation, such as the tension between members
“Each generation brings different strengths to the team, and smart leaders arrange the various strengths on their teams in such a way as to neutralize weaknesses, leveraging those strengths so the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” (Shaw, 2013, Chapter 3). From personal experiences at the workplace, it is so true that combination of people from multiple generations can accomplish more than one type of generation in the workplace. It is accurate that mixture of people from multiple generations can bring the success more than one type of generation at work. Different experiences, skills set, creativities, value, and belief can be used where needed in the
Changing a work place culture and maintain diversity in our organization would be the most critical in keeping the momentum of the culture. Advantages of a diverse environment outweigh the disadvantages, from lawsuits to establishing a competitive edge in the market. Working in an environment that has a “good–old-boy” culture may have been the in-thing in the 50’s. However, diversity in the work place today drives competitiveness by blending ideas from mingling genders, creeds, race, and age, to the global market of the 21st century. Challenges face our management today from attempting to design a culture of interconnected teams. Generational diversity
In today’s globalized world, multicultural teams accomplish a significant proportion of organizational work. Multicultural teams are formed because they improve organizational effectiveness in the global business environment. As such, multicultural teams offer huge potential to organizations. The most critical and practical challenge multicultural teams face is managing conflicts across members’ national cultural boundaries. Other cultural challenges in multicultural teams include dealing with coordination and control issues, maintaining communication richness, and developing and maintaining team cohesiveness. For multicultural teams to be effective, members must learn to address the challenges that arise from team members’ differing nationalities and cultural backgrounds.
Many businesses place an emphasis on the importance of teamwork. A good team consists of people with different skills, abilities and characters. A successful team is able to blend these differences together to enable the organisation to achieve its desired objectives.
Realizing that a group can become a high performance team is important. Accomplishing this goal is invaluable, advantageous and profitable. Once able to operate from a group to the high performing team is a great step into preparation into the big business world. Leaders and members must also realize not only how to accomplish this but that some problems will and can arise from different demographic characteristics and cultural diversity. That is if one is in such a group, which the probability would be quite high.
"Workforce diversity has been identified as one of the strategic capabilities that will add value to the organizations over their competition" (Darwin & Selvaraj, 2015). Diversity has proven itself in many companies that have implemented and managed it correctly. It is only successful if it has full attention from management down to the shop floor employees. It has to be taken seriously, controlled accurately, and pushed through the workforce properly. From top management and human resources to all employee 's need to be involved and believe in the culture change, and not just overlook waiting on it to pass by (Marques, 2007). Making proper use of diversity ensures unique individual contributions to the organization. It is important as it ensures a team has more than one way of facing the challenges. Diversity may well be the key to establishing an effective workforce and a thriving company culture in the years ahead!