Diversity in the work place (USA) managers challanges - Research Paper Example

Legislations and new technologies have made it possible for those with disabilities to join the workforce as it has become unlawful to deny a qualified person job opportunity due to physical disability (Nelson and Quick, 2012). Globalization in business transactions has also resulted in a diversified workforce as business organizations continue to discover new markets leading to opening of branches abroad therefore bringing together people from diverse national origins to work in teams for the organization (Cullen and Parboteeah, 2013).

I recently visited a bank to open an account and did not fail to notice the racial, gender, and cultural diversity of the employees. On reading the banks brochure I discovered since it was an international banking agency, employees could be rotated all over the world. The U. S society is also a factor in workplace diversity where Nelson and Quick (2012) note that by about 2020, the country’s minority population will make up over one-half of new employees who join the U.S. workforce. This the authors point out is as a result of the improved participation rates of African Americans and Hispanic Americans in the labor force.

Further, the authors see white non-Hispanics in the workforce making up 68 percent by the year 2020, 14 percent Hispanic, 11 percent African Americans and 5 percent Asian. The authors note this is an improved percentage that will see the workplace being more diversified (Nelson and Quick, 2012). Diversity in the culture of employees might pose a big challenge to managers who want to work with such a team. One of the major challenges for a diversified workforce is based on the difficulties in communication.

People from diverse cultures have different ways of encoding and decoding messages whether verbal or nonverbal. Such cultural-based interpretation of communicated messages may lead to misunderstanding among employees leading to poor workplace relations due to misinterpretation of each other’s intentions (Reece, 2013). Workplace diversity runs the risk of causing disorganization in the work place. People from the same background tend to form their own subgroups since they present the same ideas and viewpoints.

This poses a challenge to the management, as they cannot rally all the employees to take a common stand through consensus building. Due to the disorganization in the workplace, the organization suffers as production is lowered when all employees and management cannot come together to champion a common course. Diversity in the workplace comes with stereotypes on how different groups of people work in the organization. Stereotyping increases stress and anxiety as the worker faced with such a challenge feels discriminated upon leading to low output levels (Nelson and Quick, 2012).

The problem for mangers is coming up with strategic measure that will ensure effective management of people through creation of an organizational environment that attracts and retains diverse workforce by responding to changes in the demographic and social patterns