Modern companies expand their business to the international level, creating environments where people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds work together. Organizational behavior in such firms must address diversity and issues it might provoke to improve employees’ performance and establish proper working conditions. To make workplaces diverse, executives must provide equal opportunities for personnel, value openness, clear communication, and implement leadership styles that consider the differences (Duchek et al., 2020). Such organizations’ issues are conversational barriers, a confusingly wide range of opinions, biases in decision-making, and employees’ unequal professionalism (Duchek et al., 2020). This paper aims to discuss the listed issues from the perspective of organizational behavior.
Diversity in organizations is an emerging question due to the complication of the working processes where the employees with different cultural and ethnic backgrounds are involved. Several ideas to address the issues can be implemented in management, human resources, and policies. From a company’s leaders’ position, misunderstanding and biases can provoke conflicts and decrease employees’ performance. International businesses like McDonald’s solve the conversational question by hiring managers with diverse backgrounds and knowledge of foreign languages who consider cultural differences in world perception (Duchek et al., 2020). Such a practice helps show a company’s respect for diversity and create space for open communication to avoid strikes.
Human recourses can address diversity issues by implementing benchmarks for the number of people with different backgrounds to create a balanced environment. Besides establishing similar criteria regarding education and experience for migrants, minority groups’ representatives are crucial to avoid untalented people’s employment only to promote diversity (Hajro et al., 2021). Human resources management significantly influences a company’s structure, thus that section is responsible for educating employees to value equality and practice organizational behavior that allows everyone to feel comfortable.
A company’s policies are the most effective to regulate organizational behavior and address the issues. Indeed, a business must develop a document that clearly describes what diversity is for a company, how equality must be preached among the employees and executives, and what penalties would be given (Hajro et al., 2021). For example, a conflict between an employee who represents a minority group and a manager can be solved by clarifying the policies. Such a course of action would eliminate personal biases and subjective opinions, making a dispute’s outcome that values equal rights. Policy-based practices to promote diversity need to consider all sections from the board of directors to the part-time employees to ensure that no contradictory situations occur in a company.
The issues of diversity in organizational behavior become more critical as the companies open their foreign subsidiaries or hire migrants. Moreover, after the COVID-19 pandemic, the remote work conditions allowed companies to employ people worldwide. Diversity is an effective tool to improve an organization’s performance, and proper behavior management is required to achieve balance among the workers with various backgrounds. Leadership practices, human resources’ activities, and policies’ establishment can help a company avoid miscommunication, professionalism inequality, biases, and decision-making difficulties. Willingness to respect diversity must be addressed in a company’s values to make every manager and employee consider it in their behavior.
References
Duchek, S., Raetze, S., & Scheuch, I. (2020). The role of diversity in organizational resilience: a theoretical framework. Business Research, 13(2), 387-423. Web.
Hajro, A., Caprar, D. V., Zikic, J., & Stahl, G. K. (2021). Global migrants: Understanding the implications for international business and management. Journal of World Business, 56(2), 101192. Web.