Solved: What are the key roles that other cultures play in management metods, organizational

Diversity is the culture for inclusion of more and more people from different cultural backgrounds, age, gender, sexual orientation, marriage or religion belief. It helps in optimizing the employees’ potential to the best possible extent.

The ROLES that Diversity provides to an Organization in the home country are as under:

• It helps them stay competitive in the business world.
• In terms of business ethics as well, this becomes a moral responsibility which is looked high upon by the stakeholders of the Organization that a Leader works for.
• Owing to the heterogeneous model of customer base, it prevents the Organization from being viewed as ‘Conservative’.
• The diversity, when well identified and acknowledged by the Management, it gives an opportunity to motivate the employees to serve the customers in the most efficient way thereby bringing success for the leader as well.
• Offering of various development opportunities especially for the women fraternity working at lower levels since the strength is much higher than at the graduating upper levels.
• Although diversified teams are relatively difficult to manage, they have more potentialities than a non-diversified group to perform under various categories.
• The external stakeholders, usually being diverse, require the internal stakeholders to be the same in order to strike a chord and meet their expectations more efficiently.
• It helps in increasing cultural competency in the workforce thereby making the leader more effective in realizing the predetermined goals.
• It gives an opportunity to the Management to pursue the benefits of social justice.
• Adapting the Team mates’ activities in terms of the changes that is taking place in the external environment, gives the leader an opportunity to make its team withstand all kinds of external challenges pertaining to their work field.
• Diversity is a vital module of innovation thereby enabling a leader to have a competitive edge over the others in the industry.
• Demographic diversity is an emerging concept of diversity factor in the workplace therefore the Management can take the best advantage of this diversity element.
• Diversity also helps the older generation in the workplace advise the younger lot through the experience they have gone through thereby giving an opportunity for mitigating as much of risk as possible pertaining to the undertaking of a certain activity or a project.

Challenges:

• When people from different cultural groups come together, it creates the major challenge of the dissent.
• When the diversity includes the inclusion of both men and women in the picture, it is usually evident that after the child births, women are not as much determined to rejoin work is in case of the male fraternity owing to various added responsibility such as raising of the child.

·         Cultural awareness is needed for understanding and appreciating others’ values and behavioral norms. Further, conflicts arising among the team members that spring from diversity could in a way help assisting the team in completing complex problem solving.

·         Different social and cultural values in diversity don’t necessarily increase the number of conflicts a team would experience, but they can have an impact on how conflicts could be managed and resolved.

·         Effective measure of diversity is itself a big challenge. Benchmarking the diversity and analyzing its performance by the leader is a role in itself.

·         At times, the diversity results in bullying of other weaker groups or teams by the authoritative teams.

The following are the types of risks that might be introduced to the management methods, organizational behavior and business practices in the home country, when teams are culturally or geographically diverse:

·          The risk of getting a cultural shock when a member, say from America, is chosen as a Team member for an Indian Organization. Here, the American member initially might be exposed to the risk of physiological, psychological, and social reaction after being absorbed in geographically new background. The same risk would be applied to members hailing from various other countries to India. Cultural shock risk could be in terms of different management philosophies, language, alternative food and cuisines, dressing style, driving patterns, availability of goods, attitude towards work and productivity, separation from friends and colleagues, unique currency system, etc.

·          There is further an overall of risk of performance by the new members from the other countries due the communication barrier that might exist in absence of interpreters in the picture.

·          The risk of misunderstanding may also be given birth due to misinterpretation of various verbal and physical gestures by the host country and vice-versa.

·          There exist overall risks of uncertainty, conflict, motivational challenges, and economical shock when the members are completely unfamiliar to the Team etiquettes of the Host country.

·          Risk of Parochialism when the new employees forming the part of the host country’s team exhibit such behaviors which are prudent in their home country but may not get along well with that of the host country. There are possibilities that such members are unable to actually evaluate the differences of the cultural gaps existing in both the nations.

·          Risk of Ethnocentrism when the members joining the host country are already in the opinion that the working conditions are best suited only to their home countries hence working in a different cultural background would certainly pose as a big threat.

Here, Quality Assurance and Control can contribute in mitigating the above risks. Therefore, by choosing the Right Team Players in accordance to the predetermined criteria after imparting sufficient training and guidance, by defining the purpose of the team, by developing strong Team dynamics, by expecting feedback and granting rewards for good performances, various Team building relationships could be promoted by the Quality Assurance and Control Teams.