Identify the various demographic characteristics of today's workforce - Essay Example

your Diversity and Team Work In this interconnected world, one often comes across the feeling that a particular workforce is much like a beautiful multi-colored canvas. Even though the colors are either distinctly different or shades of one another, the true beauty of the picture lies in its entirety and the artist’s composing abilities. In a similar manner, demographic diversity has the ability to beneficially impact an organization, provided a manager virtually choreographs the team, getting the right notes from each.

Let us take the example of one demographic diversity viz., a Chinese worker in the US, to analyze his performance related issues.Hall and Hall classified different cultures under the categories of ‘high context and low context’ (1990). Chinese people belong to the high context culture in which context and non-verbal cues are important to assign meaning to spoken words. This means that the same words can have different meanings in different contexts. Further, work discipline like obedience to command, commitment to a word given and personal relationships are important to the Chinese.

This is in contrast to the low context culture, typically as in the US, where the spoken words are precise and unambiguous irrespective of the context, individualism and frankness is more pronounced, and personal relations are subordinate to task completion on time. While on the subject of time, a high context (your last name) 2workforce handles multiple tasks simultaneously unlike its counterpart in low context cultures, which concentrates one task at a time (Hall and Hall, 1990). These ideas are reinforced by the five dimension classification of Hofstede and Bond and the seven dimension classification of Trompenars (as quoted by Amant, K.S., 2007).

An organization benefits from the services of a Chinese migrant worker due to his/her ability to handle multiple tasks simultaneously, respect for authority, collectivism and long-term commitment. Respect for authority implies disciplined approach to complete assigned tasks; collectivism implies the ability to be a good team-member and working to achieve team goals rather than individual goals. Organizations benefit by such workers and teams for whose career development and welfare, long-term planning can be initiated.

In order to maximize the benefits of demographic diversity in an organization, the manager should foremost recognize and develop a positive attitude for the culture-specifics for each variety and understand the beneficial aspects. Since Chinese workers in a US plant may be new to the local cultural nuances, a manager must ensure to put them at ease by greater personal attention in the beginning and gradually induct them into teams of demographic diversity. In such teams, the new workers would find members of their own leaning and also from other cultures, which would provide them opportunities to forge into a team with its own composite team-culture, bringing in the best from each diverse member – initiative, dynamism, hard work, discipline, long-term commitment etc.

(your last name) 3ReferencesHall, E.T. and Hall, M.R. (1990). “Understanding cultural differences”. NicholasBrealey Publishing, London.Hampden-Turner, C.and Trompenaars, F. (2000) as quoted by Amant, K.S. (2007) in “Linguistic and cultural online communications issues in the global age” (p. 127-128). Information Science Reference, Hershey, PA. Hofstede, G. and Bond, M. (1984) as quoted by Amant, K.S. (2007) in “Linguistic and cultural online communications issues in the global age” (p.81). Information Science Reference, Hershey, PA.