Working With Diversity And Conflict For Leadership: Critical Analysis

BUSN304 Working with Diversity and Conflict

BUSN304 Working with Diversity and Conflict

The Importance of Diversity and Conflict Management in Leadership

Discuss about the Working with Diversity and Conflict for Leadership.

The aim of the essay is to critically analyse the topic, “Diversity in leadership within a firm allows managers to bring in new skills and methods for achieving unity within their teams and develop a strong culture.” The statement is critically analysed regarding CSR, leadership and HRM practices within an organisation. The essay briefs the bias that might contribute to the decrease in productivity. The essay recommends the way to eradicate the same in the culture. The term bias refers to the situation where people are drawn to others with same hobbies. In regards to the organisational context, it might affect resume screening and career advancement. Bias treatment largely effects the motivation of the staff and their morale. It also influences the commitment of the employees and the desire to advance in the organisation. Thus, the purpose of the essay is to understand why business needs to consider diversity and conflict in their business. 

Australia is popular as the multicultural society. Therefore, the workplace comprises of minorities, immigrant and non-immigrant workers, contract workers from other countries, more women, limited English-speaking workers, non-English speaking workers, and older workers. These workers have varied needs and expectations, and it may be challenging for the management as they have different skill sets. Ignoring the differences in the workplace leads to conflicts, confusion, complaints of harassments and eventually discrimination. It may hamper the team unity. It becomes difficult for the management to communicate and coordinate with such diverse group (Allard et al. 2017).  Thus, it is essential to respect the diversity to develop a strong culture. Intercultural leadership allows managers to bring in new skills and methods for achieving unity within their teams.

Diversity in leadership within the firm is important for managers due to shift in the workplace demographics and the emergence of the global market. Workplace diversity has come close to the business necessity. Lack of workplace diversity leads to bias, that is getting attracted to employees of the same culture, caste, and language. In many cases, business opportunities were found to be missed as they failed to capitalise on the mixture of genders, ages and lifestyles (Canas and Sondak 2013). When employees without the language and cultural skills are recruited, it will lead to the decrease in productivity and build a strong culture.  Other aspects of bias are stereotypes attitude towards particular culture, discrimination of women professionally and bias in giving feedback (Dunham 2017). More than conscious prejudice, unconscious bias is more predominant. HR managers in many cases were found to show bias in the hiring process, granting leaves, thus developing the unproductive workforce. For instance, a stereotype that black women are “aggressive”, decrease staff morale. The pay gap and lawsuits are some of the consequences of bias (Koch et al. 2015). In my personal experience, my maternal aunt was discriminated regarding promoting to higher designation despite being competent.

The Impact of Bias on Workplace Productivity

Without including diverse talent, creative ideas it is difficult to sustain competitive advantage. It is difficult to offer more solutions to the customers due to lack of ideas. There will be no scope for creativity, if employers are biased to take opinion and perspectives, from employees of similar background and culture (Guillaume et al. 2017). As per the findings of Harvey and Allard (2015), when heterogeneous groups are present in the organisation, there is an increase in creativity due to the cross fertilisation of one another. Therefore, to achieve one common goal an intercultural leadership can bring in the variety of solutions. For instance, Chinese workers working in the Australian company can think different from Australians. Consequently, it will lead to innovation. Thus, diversity in leadership is essential for managers as the social identity of an employee effect relationship with employees. Transformational leaders are effective in this aspect as they walk the talk and literature evidence say that it is effective in managing diversity. Diversify in leadership means employing, promoting and appreciating diversity (Wang et al. 2013).

There are several advantages of ensuring the workplace diversity by the human resource managers and senior level managers. It helps to foster mutual respect where employees working in the team can cope with the different work styles, cultures, ideas and thinking styles. It will help realise the significance or strength of the diversity and combating bias in feedback, payment and others. With the help of diversity, a pool of talented brains can be targeted to achieve common organisational goals (Moran et al. 2014). As highlighted by Allard et al. (2017) acknowledging the differences at workplace decreases the likelihood of the conflicts. By learning new skills to maintain, the unity in diversity decreases the potential liability of the employee complaints. To avoid issues on litigation, it is better to preserve the high quality relationship with the employees, supervisors, and co-workers. The study conducted by Barak (2016) argued that the diversity, when accompanied with the inclusive culture, helps deliver high performance. It decreases absenteeism, increases innovation and the customer satisfaction. Without developing the mindset of inclusion, the managers will not be able to successfully implement the diversity initiatives. Lack of inclusive mindset will cause them to behave defensively. Simply, integrating the corporate policies such as flexible working time will not help avoid lawsuits. Inclusiveness is necessary where employees embrace each other’s uniqueness, thus, decreasing the dissimilarity and bias. 

Role of Intercultural Leadership in Developing a Strong Organizational Culture

Diversity and inclusion are a part of the corporate social responsibility. Without inclusion, a company may not be able to expand on to the global market. For example, if an Australian employee can speak Japanese, he or she may not be as successful in dealing with the Japanese representative when compared to a Japanese employee. The later may better understand the culture and thinking style of the foreign representative. It will be beneficial for the business managers to learn new skills from culturally diverse workforce such as new language skills. Further, an organisation can gain reputation by being inclusive of other communities. It will also help promote corporate social responsibility (Barak 2016). For instance, by hiring Mandarin-speaking employees, a company’s sales among Chinese communities can be increased. The business and the employees will get better exposure.  Thus, it is the new method to create unity and strong culture in an organisation. Thus the given essay topic holds significant value.

When an employee fails to execute the knowledge or talent, it leads to the feeling of discrimination and bad reputation of the company. Bias may further lead to harassment and lawsuits. It will decrease the strength of job seekers. Workers are drawn to organisations with fair treatment of employees irrespective of ethnicity, minority and gender (Chuang 2013). Business may feel challenging to place an employee on different silo based on diversity profile. For instance, it may be difficult to categorise an English-speaking employee who is 51 years old and an atheist under a particular diversity. A human resource manger must develop leadership quality to respond to complex human needs to develop the strong customer base. In this context, it is justified to say that the diversity in leadership will help develop the strong culture of inclusiveness. To fulfil the corporate social responsibility, it is necessary to cater to personal needs of employees.

Based on the literature review, evidenced-based recommendations are effective in making the workplace diversity program successful. It would be effective to base the decisions of employment on job recruitment. Employees should be recruited based on the non-discriminatory and legitimate reasons. It is possible through the provision of detailed job descriptions for each designation. Based on the individual’s performance or ability the decisions related to the promotion, hiring, training, discipline, termination or demotion should be made. If an employee has great potential, with a different skill set, a training program should be provided after recruitment.  It will help them to meet the organisation’s performance standards. Older employees must be familiar with the behavioural interviews (Chuang 2013). The human resource managers to learn cross-cultural communication for communicating with different sex and culture groups; identify the do’s and don’ts of each group and ways to supervise the non-Australians.  There must be effective and consistent enforcement of the policies about harassment and discrimination. It must be applied uniformly. In this regard, there must be a record retention program for proper documentation of the entire investigation (Wang et al. 2013). 

Strategies for Inclusive Hiring

To deal with the cultural diversity issues, programs should be developed at the workplace. The workplace should design policies and the procedures that will facilitate communication with the non-English or limited-English speaking workers. However, to avoid stigmatisation or feeling of discomfort among employers must explain the essentiality of seeking such program and the need to fulfil the given job role by speaking English. The language requirement should also be mentioned in the written job description (Hunt et al. 2015). Every organisation must recruit professional translators for cases other than the investigations on harassment and discrimination. It should be determined if the need of speaking English is only for specific work time and the documents that especially needs translation for non-English speaking employees.   It is recommended that the new arrivals in the organisation such as immigrant contract workers must be trained on the acceptable workplace behaviour and the working standards of Australia. The leaders must aware the workers on the laws, values and ethics of Australia for effective risk management. The business leaders must train the exiting employees on the behaviour that cause harassment and discrimination (Wang et al. 2013). To respect the cultural diversity, culturally sensitive procedures must be adopted by the organisation. It will help receive and process the diversity questions and problems. For instance, it may be difficult for Aboriginals to be assertive, outspoken, and individualistic as Americans. The managers must develop a program to resolve the family issues (such as insurance, health issues) of the employees to make good business sense. It will help retain valuable employees. It will help fulfilment of the corporate social responsibility   For instance; AIDS awareness programs can be initiated by the managers to promote. 

The essay critically analysed the statement “Diversity in leadership within a firm allows managers to bring in new skills and methods for achieving unity within their teams and develop a strong culture”. Based on the analysis, the statement can be called as justified. Including diversity in leadership will help managers to develop new language skills, generate creative ideas in the organisation, and increase the company sales and productivity. It will lead to positive reputation of the organisation. Without the diversity in leadership, the results may be opposite.  The essay has recommended strategies for mitigating the diversity issues in the workplace. 

References

Allard, S., Qayyum, M.A. and Mehra, B., 2017. Intercultural leadership toolkit for librarians: Building awareness to effectively serve diverse multicultural populations. Education Libraries, 30(1), pp.5-12.

Barak, M.E.M., 2016. Managing diversity: Toward a globally inclusive workplace. Sage Publications.

Canas, K. and Sondak, H., 2013. Opportunities and challenges of workplace diversity. Pearson Higher Ed.

Chuang, S.F., 2013. Essential skills for leadership effectiveness in diverse workplace development.

Dunham, C.R., 2017. Third Generation Discrimination: The Ripple Effects of Gender Bias in the Workplace.

Guillaume, Y.R., Dawson, J.F., Otaye?Ebede, L., Woods, S.A. and West, M.A., 2017. Harnessing demographic differences in organizations: What moderates the effects of workplace diversity?. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 38(2), pp.276-303.

Harvey, C.P. and Allard, M., 2015. Understanding and managing diversity: Readings, cases, and exercises. Pearson.

Hunt, V., Layton, D. and Prince, S., 2015. Diversity matters. McKinsey & Company, 1.

Koch, A.J., D’Mello, S.D. and Sackett, P.R., 2015. A meta-analysis of gender stereotypes and bias in experimental simulations of employment decision making. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(1), p.128.

Moran, R.T., Abramson, N.R. and Moran, S.V., 2014. Managing cultural differences. Routledge.

Wang, P., Rode, J.C., Shi, K., Luo, Z. and Chen, W., 2013. A workgroup climate perspective on the relationships among transformational leadership, workgroup diversity, and employee creativity. Group & Organization Management, 38(3), pp.334-360.