1.0 Introduction:
The purpose of this given assignment is to identify the implications of workforce diversity towards the organisational behaviour of members in an organisation. The scope of the essay is to identify the challenges faced by age, ethnicity or race and gender diversity will face within the workplace. Within the challenges, each type of diversity will too face discrimination regarding the individuals differences.
2.0 Body of Essay:
2.1 Workforce Diversity:
Workforce diversity is referred as different people with distinctive differences work together as a team in a labour pool. Nonetheless, it can be heterogeneous individuals from different cultural background, gender, age, intellectual or physical abilities, ethnicity and race (Ugwuzor 2014, p. 39).
Furthermore, working diversity contains two different level of diversity, which are surface-level diversity and deep-level diversity. Surface-level diversity is defined as physiological distinctive characteristic in individuals, for instance, individuals’ skin colour, gender, nationality, ethnicity, ability or disability, and age (McShane & Glinow 2010, p. 21).
However, deep-level diversity is referred as individuals’ personalities, characters, values, and beliefs. As the differences of deep-level diversity among different diverse individuals are able to carry out different performance, outcome and decision-making choices (McShane et.al 2016, p.7).
Nevertheless, diversity management is the key to workforce diversity that defines as the response to the growing diversity in workforce or workplace. It is designed to build equal opportunity environment to the minorities that need an excess of employment (Barak 2011, p. 235). Thus, the law against discrimination and affirmative action programmes such as Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) is introduced through diversity management into a diverse workforce to protect employees against discrimination (Barak 2011, p. 237).
2.2 Challenges of Diversity in Workplace:
Gender diversity is equal employment opportunities to both females and males (Clegg, Kornberger & Pitsis 2011, p. 185). Gender discrimination, as women may face discrimination through their marriage status and pregnancy (Lisowska 2009, p. 43). In fact, women were often questioned regarding family circumstances and background during job interviews compared to men (Lisowska 2009, p. 44). McKinsey & Company is an example of gender diversity issue that arises between both men and women, the rejection of some men workers towards the value of women employees in the company (Devillard, Sancier-Sultan & Werner 2014).
In particular, misinterpretation and miscommunication occur as cultural clash happens between 2 or more different cultural backgrounds (Fine 1996, pg. 492). Additionally, ethnic diversity is referred as a group of individuals that shares the same ancestry or lineage, together with the same language, dialect, culture and religion idiosyncrasy (Muthuppalaniappan & Yagoob 2015, p. 1561). Undeniable, employees among the minority ethnicity face challenges such as personal conflicts or issues and unfairness in the workplace (Jaffe 2015, p. 149). An example of ethnic diversity challenges was dealing with racist jokes in the office by Saadia Muzaffar, a Pakistani employee of Toronto’s Tech Company for being a people of colour (Hughes 2015).
Moreover, multi-generations or age diversity are a mixture of employees from different ages and generations, which may lead to an occurrence of negative age discrimination either towards both older or younger employees. Issues that may stir the discriminative attitude would be such as the clash of attitude, equality and operations towards different age teams (Florian, Stephan & Heike 2013, p. 416). A company such as Google fired Brian Reid, a 54-year-old employee through age discrimination for stereotyping individual’s ideas were out-of-date while his younger colleagues discriminated his age and interest in the workplace (Fairfax Media 2010).
Nonetheless, minorities in the organisation will face challenges in facing discriminations for being different. While discrimination in the workplace occurs, the management might feel ashamed to deliver the negativity of discrimination and causes incapability in delivering awareness (Reitz et. al 2009, p. 169).
2.3 Positive and Negative Implication of Workforce Diversity:
2.3.1 Negative Organisational Behaviour Effects
Nevertheless, ethnicity diversity will have negative effects towards the organisation, such as lack of communication and weak allocation that increases turnover rate in the organisation. This is because homogeneous ethnicity group causes a rejection towards heterogeneous ethnicity employees for their differences (Joseph & Selvaraj 2015, p. 18).
Whereas gender diversity was believed that it affects the productivity and progress in an organisation, as it was believed that homogeneous gender groups of people shares similar suggestions due to a better interaction and teamwork among themselves (Ekadah & Mboya 2009, p. 134). Thus, heterogeneous teams have the higher chance of possible conflict and disagreements compare to the homogeneous team, which will cause a slower progress in a given task. This would lead to a harder interpersonal corporation among group members (Ping 214, p. 248).
However, age diversity is more likely to cause both younger and older employees to feel violated due to their age. Older generation employees may feel behind schedule compares to the younger employees, while younger employees might feel demotivated for unable to be promoted like the older employees. Thus, this may cause age discrimination among each generation and a negative stereotype among each other (Florian, Stephan & Heike 2011, p. 268). Furthermore, between baby boomers, generation X and Y have different preferences of communication. As both baby boomers and generation X prefers emails or phone calls, generation Y, however, prefers instant texts or social media such as Facebook and Twitter (Taylor 2014).
Consequently, members of the organisation will have issues such as each individual have different goals, values, interests and beliefs that lead a slower progress in achieving the main objectives (Prause & Mujtaba 2015, p. 16) . In either case, it will also cause members to divide into subgroups with professional, race, gender, ethics, age and other dimensions (McShane & Glinow p. 267).
2.3.1 Positive Organisational Behaviour Effects
Nonetheless, combining different culture’s worldview can help each other to have better understanding of consumers from different cultures practices. Organisation with a diverse teamwork has the better ability to adapt present-day’s developing workplace environment and global knowledge (Blocher, Heppner & Johnston 2008, p. 7). Thus, it is to be claimed that diverse workforce has higher innovative ideas, due to facing more conflicts within the discussion that leads to new problem-solving skills. With a diverse cultural workplace, the organisation will have clearer understanding towards the global marketplace from diverse workers’ knowledge (Bedi, Lakra & Gupta 2010, p. 102).
On the contrary, organisations that hire employees from different cultural ethnicity background often able to adopt technologies that are capable in providing needed skills at a lower cost (Post & DiTomaso, 2004, p. 7). Besides, with ethnic diversity, an organisation will have a better understanding of workplace discrimination and to have better skills to improve the situation compare to the other organisations as discrimination might take place (Dickie & Soldan 2008, p. 13). To illustrate, eBay is currently the most ethnically diverse company that contains 39% non-caucasian and 61% caucasian workers, as the company is trying to hire different ethnicity (Eadicicco 2014). Nevertheless, eBay’s annual revenue had increased rapidly from the year of 2011 to 2014 (Statista 2016).
Figure 1: Ethnicity Percentage in eBay (Eadicicco 2014)
Figure 2: eBay’s Annual Revenue. (Statista 2016) Notwithstanding, a more diverse gender workforce increases the ethical and moral aspect during the conference before the making a critical decision (Larkin, Bernadi & Bosco 2012, p. 4). To clarify, women in workforce provides a different viewpoint to different circumstances and problems faced by the organisation, that leads to a more creative and positive decision-making for better profit (Hills 2015, p. 162).
For instance, BuzzFeed has more audience since 2013. In the year 2013, BuzzFeed had 60 million viewers in social media. However, it rapidly increases to 500 million in 2014, and 1000 million viewers in the year 2015 that proofs the creativity through diverse gender employees bring out different production and progress (Statista 2015). The fact that BuzzFeed too manages the percentage of gender in the organisation well, as the company consists 48% women and 52% men employees globally (Peretti 2015). In addition, diverse workforce with proper positive management is also capable of reducing the cost of absenteeism, turnover and lawsuit, granting the organisation to reduce its labour cost (Nahavandi & Malekzadeh 1999, p. 86).
Figure 1: Viewers that visited BuzzFeed’s social media webpage and YouTube channel (Statista 2015)
Figure 2: Percentage of Gender hired by BuzzFeed in the organization. (Peretti 2015)
The positive organisational behaviour effects of Age diversity is to provide the organisation a more diversified problem-solving skills and a better understanding the different cultural norms from both young and old generations. This is because diverse generations members have different preferences, knowledge, values, beliefs and information that interprets different viewpoint to provide innovative ideas and solve unexpected problems in various circumstances (Backes-Gellner & Veen 2013, p. 282).
3.0 Conclusion:
In conclusion, despite diversity in the workplace may face problems, but the problems are solvable through proper diversity management. Heterogeneous employees tend to have conflicts due to opinion clash. Although it slows down the progress of the organisation, but workforce diversity with proper management is able to gather better information and knowledge through diverse members. Furthermore, it creates a unique competitive advantage for the organisation, which gives the organisation the opportunity to have better performance and innovative production. In fact, conflicts and disagreement create better problem-solving skills for the organisation for possible issues to be faced in the future.
On the other hand, management in the organisation will have a greater image of workplace discrimination issues and ways to deal with such occurrence if it were to happen in a workplace. Therefore, providing training and development for both management and all members of the organisation will be able to adapt to the diverse culture and workplace in order to have greater performance in upcoming tasks.
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