In the workplace, diversity plays a key role in organizations by promoting their creativity and making more open to change. The trends of globalization, including the fact that employees and employers from various countries become closer to each other, there is a need to manage diversity.
The current labor force becomes diverse in terms of gender, age, race, religion, beliefs, and other characteristics, which should be taken into account by companies (Guillaume et al. 279). Human capital serves as one of the assets of any company, which provides knowledge, skills, and competences. In this connection, it is of great importance to explore the impact of workplace diversity on organizational development.
The teams organized from people with various backgrounds are likely to produce more ideas and consider a given theme from different points of view. A range of options leads to the opportunity to choose from them or combine many solutions to achieve the best results possible.
Therefore, it is necessary to study how the integration of employees having different age, culture, or experience impacts a company’s development. In particular, the strategies that can be adopted to stimulate them to work in collaboration, and possible barriers should be analyzed. The attention should also be paid to the relevant evidence that discusses case studies and experiments that were conducted in real-life conditions.
The awareness of how to encourage employees to accept and respect workplace diversity is another area of investigation. In spite of the organizational regulations that are introduced by many companies, some employees still encounter stigma from their colleagues, which is based on cultural, social, religious, and any other differences (Lu et al. 858).
The inability of management to ensure workplace diversity is likely to impede and even stop the organizational development of a company. In this regard, one may suggest that the approaches of strategic human resources management should be considered in detail to improve communication and relationships among the personnel. The specific needs of organizations and stigmatized employees need to be examined, so that the pertinent actions would be introduced by managers and leaders.
Personally, I have some experience in exploring the role of diversity in the workplace. I was working as a manager in the store of my friend’s father, and I had the opportunity to conduct an experiment with employees, who had different cultural backgrounds. I gathered them and applied the communication theory, explaining that each of them is welcome to express the ideas about improving the service in this store. Such an approach caused the suggestion to become more attentive to customers and interact with them longer. As a result, these methods allowed increasing the overall revenue by seven percent within two months.
I am enthusiastic about exploring the links between employees’ culture and organizational development since I believe that people are important for any business. In the conditions when the increased attention is paid to communication and human resources management, it is vital to balance the productivity of a company and the well-being of employees.
The evidence shows that those companies that help their employees to accomplish their goals are more successful compared to their competitors that do not consider this factor significant (Peretz et al. 880). Therefore, I would like to study the area of workplace diversity in the context of organizational development, focusing on labor force training, communication, relationship-building, and problem-solving.
Works Cited
Guillaume, Yves RF, et al. “Harnessing Demographic Differences in Organizations: What Moderates the Effects of Workplace Diversity?.” Journal of Organizational Behavior, vol. 38, no. 2, 2017, pp. 276-303.
Lu, Chia-Mei, et al. “Effect of Diversity on Human Resource Management and Organizational Performance.” Journal of Business Research, vol. 68, no. 4, 2015, pp. 857-861.
Peretz, Hilla, et al. “Organizational Diversity Programs Across Cultures: Effects on Absenteeism, Turnover, Performance and Innovation.” The International Journal of Human Resource Management, vol. 26, no. 6, 2015, pp. 875-903.
