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What is workforce diversity and why is managing it so important
Workforce diversity in a company
Managing a diverse workforce
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In today’s ever changing and highly integrated world, corporations have a growing need to hire and maintain an exceedingly diverse and multicultural workforce. With increasing globalization, multinational corporations have a great advantage as they have an opportunity to work in different cultures and take advantage of a diverse pool of skills. However, there is a major cost of working in a different culture. Various issues arise when managing a culturally diverse workforce and the management needs to tackle the problems effectively. It is important to have an idea of different cultures as it helps in improving the efficiency and productivity of the employees. However, there are many issues when we are conducting cross-cultural analysis. These issues arise because of our lack of understanding of other cultures and at times, we are ignorant about our own culture. This can result in confusion about other cultures and we fail to understand that completely. This is a very serious issue that needs to be identified and resolved, as it is results in serious distortions about the cultures we are trying to understand. The paper will highlight various theoretical and practical cross-cultural management issues and will include various recommendations to solve these problems.
CROSS-CULTURAL MANAGEMENT ISSUES
The term culture is versatile and can be explained as a broad idea or concept. It is difficult to explain the term with a single definition, however, It can be defined as a set of values which define a way of life for the individuals and the society. It explains what is good or bad and right or wrong in a particular society. Thus, culture is a value system, which provides the ways of perceiving people, thinking patterns and the socia...
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...ndations, which are helpful in solving these issues. Though sophisticated stereotyping and schemas are a helpful tool in understanding a culture but they are not sufficient. We need certain advanced tools to understand a culture completely. One of the most essential elements is attributional knowledge along with factual and conceptual understanding. This simply means that one should have an understanding to give credit when credit is due i.e. a person should have a clear understanding that any characteristic can be applied to anyone in a particular situation. This can be done through practice and by using a step by step model of cultural understanding. A detailed description of the Cultural Sense Making Model has been provided. By having a thorough understanding of our own culture and by considering context, we can have a better understanding of a different culture.
Giger (2013) defines culture as a response in behavior that is shaped over time by values, beliefs, norms and practices shared by members of one's cultural group. A person's culture influences most aspects of his or her life including beliefs, conduct, perceptions, emotions, language, diet, body image, and attitudes about illness and pain (He...
Culture is the treasury of knowledge. Culture preserves knowledge and helps its transmission from generation to generation through its means that is language helps not only the transmission of knowledge but also its preservation. Understanding culture in terms of human lives it can also be defined as the body of human customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits constituting a distinct complex of tradition of a racial, religious, or social group. According to me ,Culture also defines our social attributes such as what we eat and drink, how we dress, on what situations we laugh, weep, sleep, love to be friends with, what profession we like, what god we worship, what knowledge we rely upon, and what type of music we like to hear. Each
Culture is a society’s set of unique patterns of behaviors and beliefs (Rohall, D. E., Milkie, M. A., & Lucas, J. W. (2014). Social Psychology Sociological Perspectives (3rd ed.). NJ: Pearson). Culture can be identified in many ways, it can be identified by your family, the way you feel about certain things, your decision making, and so forth. For example, I was raised in a Mexican and sort of religious household so for me, my values and beliefs differ from other peoples’. My Mexican culture taught me to value our hard work and appreciate what we have in our lives. With that belief I grew up always appreciating what I had and even what I didn’t have at times. Another concept my culture taught me was to always respect my elders and show them manners regardless of their race,
Cultural diversity in the workplace is becoming more and more prevalent. Corporations in all industries are encouraging minorities, women, elderly workers, people with disabilities as well as foreign workers to join white males in the workplace. The following analysis will focus on these groups and how companies are encouraging them to join an ever-expanding workplace.
The workforce of America is more diverse than it has ever been. White male upper class men no longer solely dominate companies. Women, people of color, and other minority groups are now rising in the ranks and demanding change. How can one know all the ways to manage such a diverse group of employees? Through a variety of ideas, experiments, and attempts, leaders across the nation are looking for solutions to this answer. Not only are people coming from different ethnicities, we are also experiencing a great influx of workers from nations all across the globe. To keep the level of job satisfaction high, workers must be able to feel comfortable in their workplace environment. It is almost impossible for a person to know everything about all cultures and be aware of what may or may not offend a person from a different ethnic group. What must be done is to teach cultural awareness and diversity training. Basically what I have discovered in reading the journal articles is that there is no one right way to run a company but there are definitely ‘better’ ways when it comes to cultural sensitivity in the workplace. As I continue my research, I am looking to find what some of the most effective ways to manage a culturally diverse workplace. Some of the issues that I am coming across are related to gender, race/ethnicity, communication patterns, and power struggles. I feel this subject is very relevant to our course because as we focus on management and human relations, we must take into account the humans that we are managing. Even if we just look at the diversity of our class we see how different our perspectives can be. To be an effective manager in this day and age, cultural diversity issues must be given serious consider...
Culture by definition is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices, as well as customary beliefs, social forms and material traits that characterize a racial, religious or ...
Cultural diversity can bring tangible benefits to an organization who is ready to foster, maintained, and value the difference in cultures. The marketplace is becoming more competitive, many business executives are expanding and developing new ideas, products and services beyond their usual culture or environment. A diverse workforce will help to understand the need and interest of another culture within and outside of the region. Thereby helping the company to expand globally, acquire more business opportunities, provide opportunities to create an excellent, diverse customer base and remain compe...
Throughout the years, humans have shaped the world and many societies have developed different cultural patterns. Culture is the way of life of a society. Through culture, we learn how to collaborate with groups of people and we learn how to survive and adapt to changes. It is composed of values and beliefs that are shared by other members of society, as well as species survival. Every culture has different cultural elements that are vital to one’s survival in a certain place.
Culture is a set of beliefs, values and attitudes that a person inherits from a society or a group that they are in and they learn how to view the world and how to behave, these principles can then be passed down from generation to generation so that the culture that has been inherited can live on for
For the purpose of this paper, I will define what the term Diversity means, and then I will concentrate on the diversity as a result of geographic origin or ethnic diversity. I will look at how ethnic diversity is managed generally and then how my employer, deals with the diverse ethnic groups in its organization and what it needs to improve on.
Culture has a variety of meanings in our daily lives. Culture is defined as objects created by a society as well as the ways of thinking, acting, and behaving in a society (Macionis). Culture has a variety of elements that is important in understand. To grasp culture, we must consider both thoughts and things. Culture shapes not only what we do, but also what we think and how we feel.
Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people…Culture in its broadest sense of cultivated behavior; a totality of a person’s learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning (http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/choudhury/culture.html).
Culture is the whole system of ideas, action and result of the work of human beings in the frame work of the life of the community. Culture includes everything that is reserved, and his sense of hu...
Culture is the totality of learned, socially transmitted customs, knowledge, material objects and behavior. It includes the ideas, value, customs and artifacts of a group of people (Schaefer, 2002). Culture is a pattern of human activities and the symbols that give these activities significance. It is what people eat, how they dress, beliefs they hold and activities they engage in. It is the totality of the way of life evolved by a people in their attempts to meet the challenges of living in their environment, which gives order and meaning to their social, political, economic, aesthetic and religious norms and modes of organization thus distinguishing people from their neighbors.
What is culture? Culture is identity; it’s the indigenous or non-indigenous ideology, habits, customs, appearances and beliefs that people are either raised by or adapt to from different nations surrounding. It is a network of knowledge shared by a group of people. Culture consists of configurations, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior obtained and spread by symbols establishing the distinctive achievement of human groups including their embodiments in artifacts; the vital core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values. Culture systems may, on one hand, be considered as products of action, and on the other, as conditioning influences upon further action.