Diversity and Intercultural Communication in the Workplace

Diversity and Intercultural Communication in the Workplace
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Diversity and Intercultural Communication in the Workplace
Modern workplaces are increasingly becoming culturally diverse as firms such as where I work push to comply with legislation or pursue the benefits accrued from a diverse workforce. However, cultural diversity presents a significant challenge in managing and engaging employees. Therefore, intercultural communication is critical for managing and engaging a diverse workforce. This paper aims to define organizational diversity, explain its importance to corporate success, and illustrate why diversity is essential for a positive work culture and environment. The paper also defines intercultural communication and explains how it affects organizational success.
Organizational Diversity and its Importance to Organizational Success
The term workforce diversity originated in the 1990s, and socioeconomic trends fueled it. These trends fundamentally changed the types and number of people comprising organizational workforces. Today, workforce diversity describes the differences between people at work, workforce statistics, or other data illustrating that labour forces have been and continue to become increasingly heterogeneous (Roberson, 2019). Experts may also define organizational diversity as equal employment and opportunity without biases, including ethnic, racial, sexual orientation, or gender. In other words, organizational diversity defines an organization whose workforce is demographically diverse, meaning different genders, races, cultures, religions, ethnicities, or languages. Multiple identities, experiences, and cultural or national backgrounds are among the main defining features of a diverse workforce (Roberson, 2019). Modern multicultural societies offer a critical glimpse of what diversity entails. For example, a diverse organization in the United States will comprise a fair share of women, African Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and even people of foreign origins employed across the entire organizational hierarchy.
Diversity directly influences organizational success depending on a firm’s management ability. At the individual level, diversity means dissimilarities across organizational groups. These dissimilarities may result in distrust, bias, and reduced self-esteem and well-being of individuals (Roberson, 2019). These elements are detrimental to organizational success since individuals’ productivity ultimately reflects in the corporate output. At the group and organizational levels, diversity raises communication challenges and reduces social integration. Due to reduced cohesion, diversity hinders the ability of organizations to enhance their productivity. However, many firms seek diversity due to the benefits it brings to them. In other words, firms that have managed to resolve the potential challenges of a diverse workforce can reap the benefits of diversity. These include improved productivity since diversity allows more processes and ideas to flow. Diverse experiences and perspectives can also benefit productivity since a firm has a broader pool of options. Additionally, diversity leads to increased creativity and innovation, faster problem-solving, and improved decision-making, which are critical success factors for an organization.
How Diversity is Essential to a Positive Work Culture and Environment
Diversity is essential to a positive work culture and environment. Many studies on the role of diversity in corporate productivity have established that diversity could cause internal conflicts, which could be neutralized by the power of supporting policies and a positive work environment (Gomez & Bernet, 2019). Diversity helps in making firms establish an open environment. Such an environment minimizes the adverse effects of friction inevitable in culturally div...