Managing Gender & Cultural Diversity In The Workplace

Introduction to Portfolio

Discuss about the EPortfolio for Journal of Research in Commerce & Management. 

I have always grown up knowing that I am a go-getter. I have a strong believe that I can always make the impossible become possible. Furthermore, as a social personal, I have come to appreciate everyone that I meet irrespective of his or her nationalities, sex, profession, or age. It is because of this personality that I have managed to work with different people.

I have had a chance to work with two companies as interns. My earlier exposure to a real life work environment made me start to appreciate diversity and the fact that we all come from different backgrounds.

In this ePortfolio, I am going to present a number of things that I have managed to learn about the topic of “Managing gender & cultural diversity in the workplace”. In overall, my portfolio covers three different artefacts that have played a key role of supporting my learning journal.

1. a reflection as to why diversity is essential in the different organizations and analysis of roles played by managers
2. managing of different diversity group – a reflection on how we formed and performed in our group work about managing gender & cultural diversity in the workplace
3. challenges of managerial communication

The artefact forms part of my first assignment on management of diversity. The major area that I focused on involved responding to the question about the importance of diversity in different organizations. Furthermore, as an artefact, I have managed to draw numerous lessons about the role of managers in motivating employees.

After reading the work of (Andrew Patrick, 2011), I have learn that diversity has a strong connection to the work of managers in any organization. For example, diversity in organizations is now evident in a number of areas including different performance among employees, sexual orientation, gender, nationality, religion, age, and race. During their functions, managers come across different forms of diversity that determine how they shape and design their practices.

I now understand that reasonable management practise require that managers develop different important aspects. I also feel that every field of life apart of just a workplace, require diversity. It is through this that we can get to appreciate our differences with our friends not on the negative side but on strengthening our personalities (Rajput and Talan, 2017). Employees that come from different cultural backgrounds can get a strong fusion with their counterparts who come from different countries. The fact that I have a passion of working in different countries, I have gained a strong understanding of what I expect from other employees. 

Even though I had participated in different groups before in my earlier learning, this module gave me a unique opportunity to participate in a real life group work on diversity. In our group for example, we sought to understand how managers can manager gender and cultural diversity at the workplace. Our group comprised of 4 members. I was so much existed to work with a diversified group whose members come from different nationalities. Even though the rest of our group involved an easier work on most of us, we found the first part of forming our group a little bit complex. In fact, half of the members said that our difficulties must have developed because we had never bet before.

Importance of Diversity in Organizations

Besides, after sharing our names, we got our group rolling when everyone agreed to share role and present the final research report on Samsung. The group provided me with an opportunity to understand that in order for a team to achieve its objective, members need to collaborate. Hence, equal opportunities were a matter for every one of us.

Even as I aspire to work in multinational companies, I am now aware that some of the issues that I might have to confront include workplace bullying, employee recognition, and language barriers. Thanks to our group for making, we develop a bigger picture of what happens in real life companies. Neault and Mondair (2011) explain in their journal how team members experienced verbal abuse through intimidation, unrelenting teasing, and snide comments. Most importantly, I now understand and seek to prepare myself from such scenarios that might come from my co-workers or authorities who might create hard conditions to work. Similar to what we applied in our group, I am now confident that I will apply same approach while responding to cases of bullying.

My future aspirations to work as a manager will position me at a better position to recognize employees who perform extraordinarily. Ayub, Aslam and Razzaq (2013) reiterates that the process of rewarding and recognising others who go an extra mile to achieve positive performance could become a major motivator. While some people prefer using extrinsic motivators, there are those that prefer intrinsic motivators that come from their own personality.

Besides, working in diversified companies could affect my future motivation to work. Hofstede maintain that while some cultures have strong appeal towards appreciation at an individual level, some only support working together as a team. Hence, the structure of reward and recognition designed by different companies working in other markets that are outside my home country, might define my performance.

My aspirations to work in multinational companies now place me at a pivot point where I could depend on language to achieve positive results. Mittal (2016) maintains that working, as a team can only become a success when everyone speaks one tone. Language defines how we all share ideas with our friends (Ozgen, Nijkamp and Poot, 2017). In the current globalized economy, anyone who aspires to work in foreign environment is sure of experiencing a language shock. Nonetheless, we should not blame ourselves for not knowing one or two languages spoken by our peers who come from other cultural background. Besides, I might start to introduce myself to some of the foreign languages such as Chinese or Spanish.

Managing Gender and Cultural Diversity in the Workplace

After covering this topic, I can now ask comfortably about concepts of communication process, the manner in which I could learn to effectively communicate in diversified groups, the possible challenges is likely to experience. The recent study conducted by Rawat and Basergekar (2016) has helped in justifying the way I communicate with my friends – through the actual words that I use, the tone of my voice, as well as the body language. I am aware that in one way or another, communication messages mode from senders, encoding, channel, decoding, and finally to the receive. However, some of the factors that I have come to experience while sharing with my friends is the barriers of communication. Most importantly, I have found myself excusing myself whenever my friend calls me at a noisy environment or network failure.

Of course, this is something that arises in everyday life of managers. Advancement in technology can provided a platform where we all create and share content. As a manager, I might find myself embracing much as social web platforms. Unlike the traditional way of communicating, the social platforms like Twitter, Yahoo, and Google are proving to be most effective way of accessing information about the company.

Nonetheless, as a manager, I will ensure that my effective communication helps me to champion and sell my ideas, get to negotiate agreement with departmental heads, implemented needed change, as well as ensuring a smooth flow of information. Maybe one question that I might need to answer as this particular time, is how am I going to champion and sell my new ideas. The answers to this questions lies in what Mittal (2016) says that for any good manager, one must ensure he/she thinks correctly about that which is to be achieved. Two, one must also identify the correct audience. Third and most importantly, is the matching the message to the audience, and context, and the desire results. 

Conclusion

The issue of diversity in organizations play a key role in determining how people are different in terms of their language, religion, race, nationality, age, heights, and performance. After conducting a review of an article in assignment 1, I have come to learn that there are several strengths to work in a diversified group that a homogenous group where everyone has also most similar characteristics. While such groups are like to avoid much of conflict arising from our differences, it is imperative to point out that as a future manager, it will help eliminate cases of discrimination as well as inequality among workers. I also feel that embracing diversity could be one way of making members develop and share innovative ideas for better processes or products.

Diversity has a direct connection with group formation. The fact that I have previously been involved in-group work, I have gained a strong understanding of ways to form and strengthen groups. Most importantly, workplace diversity groups are likely to experience opposition most importantly, during the initial group formation phase. However, as people progress through a group, they find easier to trust one another. It is from this that a majority of members prefer allocating roles to everyone. This approach helps bring out the aske of communication in a group, conflict resolution, and understanding the strengths of being different.

While working with other members in a group, I managed to understand a number of concepts that affect real life companies. They include equal opportunities, workplace bullying, employee recognition, and language. My future position will see me work closely with teams to assist them not only achieve their personal goals but also those of my organization. My desire to work in a multinational company is because of workplace environment that present challenges as well as ways of getting around them. 

References

Andrew Patrick, H. (2011). Knowledge Workers Demography and Workplace Diversity. Journal of Marketing & Management, 2(2), 38-73.

Ayub, A., Aslam, M. S., & Razzaq, A. (2013). Examining factors affecting diversity in the workplace. CLEAR International Journal Of Research In Commerce & Management, 4(5), 136-138.

Mittal, S. (2016). Work Place Diversity in the VUCA World. Human Capital, 20(1), 62-65.

Neault, R. A., & Mondair, S. (2011). Supporting workplace diversity: emerging roles for employment counselors. Journal of Employment Counselling, 48(2), 72-80.

Ozgen, C., Nijkamp, P., & Poot, J. (2017). The elusive effects of workplace diversity on innovation. Papers in Regional Science, 96S29-S49. doi:10.1111/pirs.12176

Rajput, N., & Talan, A. (2017). Interpersonal trust as the mediator of workplace diversity and well-being of employees. Indian Journal of Health & Wellbeing, 8(7), 668-673.

Rawat, P. S., & Basergekar, P. (2016). Managing Workplace Diversity: Performance of Minority Employees. Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, 51(3), 488-501.