Diversity in the Workplace
Diversity in the workplace can be explored from many different avenues, it can be explored through different multicultural aspects, or by different heterogeneities. There are definite positives and negatives to having both in a workplace. In this paper, it discusses the different types of diversity in the workplace and how they may affect employees, co-workers, and managers, in both negative and positive ways.
The Multicultural and the Workplace
One way to be diverse in a workplace is to be a multicultural individual. Multicultural individuals are individuals that internalize with 2 or more cultural schemas. A multicultural individual also internalizes with a cultural identity that consists of the knowledge, beliefs, …show more content…
Second, multicultural individuals are not quite understood in the context of organizations [2](Bell, 1990; Brennan & Thomas, 2010; Hong, 2010; Lee, 2010). Although, a significant amount of our workforce is made up of multicultural individuals, my belief is that we don’t know enough about others culture to understand the differences, which may make it harder for them and us. Consequently, researchers and companies have devised a program called expatriate. This program is to temporarily assign a position to an employee in a foreign country. Going abroad is beneficial for the employee because he/her gains experience that may be invaluable for their career and challenge them to increase their understanding and appreciation of differences across cultures [3](Baur & Erdogan, 2016). Although many people in the U.S. come from different cultures one is not considered multicultural, if they do not identify with the culture. Some individual will keep their culture to themselves keeping it out of the workplace. Identity integration is the extent to which individuals integrate their …show more content…
Heterogeneity is the nature of opposition, or contrariety of qualities [5](Wikipedia). These consist of age, gender, tenure, and race. In Becker’s [6](1957) model of co-worker discrimination suggests that demographic differences among co-workers may create communication friction if workers are prejudiced. For example: if a newer Asian employee has a question about a work subject, he might have reservations asking a Caucasian employee with tenure for help, but if a newer employee were to ask another newer employee of the same culture he may not feel uncomfortable. As we get more comfortable with our fellow employees the spillover hypothesis may take effect. In this case spillover pertains to the knowledge spilling from one employee to another, as long as workers’ information sets are relevant to one another [7](Lazear, 1999). With the spillover hypothesis; it says that the effects of dissimilarities will diminish with a worker’s tenure in the division, this means as employees work together their chance of sharing different ideas become far and few
Diversity in the workplace can be explored from many different avenues, it can be explored through different multicultural aspects, or by different heterogeneities. There are definite positives and negatives to having both in a workplace. In this paper, it discusses the different types of diversity in the workplace and how they may affect employees, co-workers, and managers, in both negative and positive ways.
The Multicultural and the Workplace
One way to be diverse in a workplace is to be a multicultural individual. Multicultural individuals are individuals that internalize with 2 or more cultural schemas. A multicultural individual also internalizes with a cultural identity that consists of the knowledge, beliefs, …show more content…
Second, multicultural individuals are not quite understood in the context of organizations [2](Bell, 1990; Brennan & Thomas, 2010; Hong, 2010; Lee, 2010). Although, a significant amount of our workforce is made up of multicultural individuals, my belief is that we don’t know enough about others culture to understand the differences, which may make it harder for them and us. Consequently, researchers and companies have devised a program called expatriate. This program is to temporarily assign a position to an employee in a foreign country. Going abroad is beneficial for the employee because he/her gains experience that may be invaluable for their career and challenge them to increase their understanding and appreciation of differences across cultures [3](Baur & Erdogan, 2016). Although many people in the U.S. come from different cultures one is not considered multicultural, if they do not identify with the culture. Some individual will keep their culture to themselves keeping it out of the workplace. Identity integration is the extent to which individuals integrate their …show more content…
Heterogeneity is the nature of opposition, or contrariety of qualities [5](Wikipedia). These consist of age, gender, tenure, and race. In Becker’s [6](1957) model of co-worker discrimination suggests that demographic differences among co-workers may create communication friction if workers are prejudiced. For example: if a newer Asian employee has a question about a work subject, he might have reservations asking a Caucasian employee with tenure for help, but if a newer employee were to ask another newer employee of the same culture he may not feel uncomfortable. As we get more comfortable with our fellow employees the spillover hypothesis may take effect. In this case spillover pertains to the knowledge spilling from one employee to another, as long as workers’ information sets are relevant to one another [7](Lazear, 1999). With the spillover hypothesis; it says that the effects of dissimilarities will diminish with a worker’s tenure in the division, this means as employees work together their chance of sharing different ideas become far and few