- Information
- AI Chat
Was this document helpful?
Assignment - 1 CIE
Course: Supply chain (BUSI3005)
44 Documents
Students shared 44 documents in this course
University: Loyalist College
Was this document helpful?
Journal of Diversity Management – Fourth Quarter 2007 Volume 2, Number 4
1
Cultural Diversity:
Implications For Workplace Management
Donatus I. Amaram, (E-mail: damaram@vsu.edu), Virginia State University
ABSTRACT
The acceptance and management of cultural diversity have been promoted and touted as a
positive tool in social and organizational engineering aimed at solving and preventing group
dynamics problems in both business organizations and society as well. Positive attributes of
cultural integration in business organizations have received fair and significant attention in the
past two decades. What have not been sufficiently presented are the challenges and pitfalls
inherent in the management of culturally diverse work groups. For the practicing manager, there
is a need to know when and where mono- and multi-cultural arrangements may be preferred. This
paper reviews relevant research findings that can be used for building effective paradigms in the
management of cultural diversity in the workplace.
INTRODUCTION
he last two decades have seen significant efforts on the part of scholars and policy makers to embark
on initiatives to acknowledge, accept, and value cultural differences among ethnic groups in place of
the traditional melting pot approach whose objectives have been to assimilate minorities into the
mainstream at the expense of their cultural identities. This changing accent on accepting differences and diversity
has led to a new and emerging school of thought on how to manage people and organizations for effective
performance in a globally competitive business environment. This requires crafting management concepts and
application techniques to deal with the challenges and opportunities posed by an increasingly diverse culture. These
challenges and opportunities include cultural influences on job satisfaction, levels of inter-group biases and
prejudices, degrees of cooperativeness and overall individual and group performance. This paper reviews the
“culture literature” and attempts to synthesize research findings on the effects of cultural diversity on issues and
attributes relative to comparative work behavior of various ethnic groups.
CHANGING PERSPECTIVES OF CULTURAL DIVERSITY
Efforts to protect and improve the rights of minorities over the past two decades have led to a rethinking of
the propriety of the “melting pot” mentality and the exploration of new perspectives on the management of cultural
diversity in the workplace. Cultural diversity has been defined as “the representation, in one social system, of people
with distinctly different group affiliations of cultural significance” (Cox, 1993). The traditional approach to handling
multiculturalism in complex organizations has been to expect members of the minority culture to adapt to the
cultural requirements of the majority group. What forces have triggered the subtle but perceptible shift away from
assimilation and towards diversity? Several organizational dynamics contribute to the growth of the diversity
perspective. First, a quest for social justice, though a goal of the assimilation concept, has been largely elusive under
it. Moral, ethical and social responsibilities toward minority members of society and of business organizations in
particular have provided the impetus for a search for new and better paradigms to improve the lot of racio-ethnic and
gender minorities. Second, legal obligations arising from civil rights laws and the attendant affirmative action
programs have made it necessary for organizations to find alternative ways to eliminate racial and gender
discrimination in education and employment (Ramakrishnan and Balgopal, 1995). Third, the limitations of
affirmative action which have led to calls for new proposals to replace it, (Gottfredson, 1992, p.279; Thomas, 1990,
p. 107) and the strategic imperatives imposed on American businesses for competitive advantage in the global
marketplace, have created more pressures to acknowledge and deal with cultural diversity in a way that recognizes
T