Week 12: Organisational diversity

Something funny to start on diversity

This week lecture covers on diversity in gender, age, physical or mental ability and race, ethnicity and religion in the workplace. Due to the rapid demographic changes in the workforce, there are increasing numbers of women and wide range of different culture groups joining the organizations. However, these groups of people are considered the minorities and they have a greater difficulty in getting jobs and in climbing the corporate ladder to join the ranks of upper management due to the phenomenon of ‘Glass ceiling’. This concept is popularized in 1980s to describe a barrier to subtle that it is transparent, yet so strong that it prevents women and minorities from moving up the management position. It is a sign of discrimination and stereotyping in the workplace which causes bias treatment towards minorities. Prejudice refers to negative attitudes towards an organisation member based on their culture group identity and discrimination is an observable behaviour for same reason as prejudice. There are four issues of organisational relationships and systems leading to differences of experiences for minorities, one is the limited access to or exclusion from informal communication networks, two is the difficulty of establishing mentor-protégé relationships between white men and women and people of colour. Three, tokenism is where the minorities who are in the top management are constantly being ask to represent their people with questions such as ‘what do your type of people thinks of this idea?’, four are the types of work experiences by minorities hamper their ability to advance in organisations. 

Moving beyond prejudice and discrimination towards minorities, organizations are required to have a solution to this issue. The three phases of workplace development will produce a multicultural organisation where marks the absence of discrimination, low levels of intergroup conflict and high level of organisational identification for all gender and ethic group. First-generation affirmative action are to meet legal mandated requirements for diversity, second is to meet affirmative action goals of numbers and emphasis shifts to supporting female and minority employees and thirdly is a multicultural organisation where it moves beyond concept of support for minority members to institution of policies capitalize on cultural and gender diversity. Life in diverse organisation involves both attitude and action and challenge and opportunity must be dealt with. Organizations are to be knowledgeable about the needs and contributions of diverse members. Five steps to transform a traditional organisation into multicultural organisation are introduced and it involves leadership, training, research, analysis and change of culture and human resources management systems.

For this week tutorial, my group are required to share on the results of the research activities on diversity communication which was done for assignment two. Our group decided to present on my research partner’s and my report on Generational diversity. Our research emphasised on the communication issues between distinct generations arises in the workplace. The three generations (Baby boomers, Generation X and Y often colliding as thri paths cross while working together because of the different values, idea, ways to get things done and also the different ways of communicating with each other in the workplace. Thus, these differences might cause misunderstandings and affect the organisational communication within a company. We focused on the communication channel, style, content used and information flow among employees in the workplace of The Star Publication. We conclude that the three generations may have different historical background and possesses vast difference in values and work ethics but they do not disagree on everything when it comes to communication among colleagues in the workplace. We also recommended for the company to approach the older colleagues on the issue of interns feeling intimidated on their first week due to the unfriendly vibe portrayed by them. Making a new member felt welcome will make them feel the belonging in a company and less likely resultant in high turnover rate.