Critical Analysis Essay

Running Head: ENSURING DIVERSITY IN THE WORKFORCE 1

ENSURING DIVERSITY IN THE WORKFORCE 2

Always save your paper with your name and title!

Ensuring Diversity in the Workforce

Emad N. Alkhadabah

Central Michigan University

Master of Science in Administration

MSA 698: Directed Administrative Portfolio

Dr. Larry F. Ross

February 28, 2021

Ensuring Diversity in the Workforce

Introduction

Diversity in the place of work is a very important aspect of any organization. This is one of the most popular business environment subjects, primarily because of the changing demographics. Diversity in the workplace and organizational behavior has a significant impact on employment trends and business and public organizations. This has mostly been due to the increased globalization.

Globalization is a multifaceted and versatile phenomenon. It involves intercontinental integration as a product of the exchange where there is a universal exchange of nationwide and cultural resources in this process. Therefore, it is essential to acknowledge, understand, accept, value, and celebrate differences among people concerning their class, ethnicity, gender, race, sexual orientation, spirituality, and other differences. Diversity and inclusion at the workplace yield dividends in many respects, while a lack of diversity and inclusion acts as a tax on work teams' engagement and performance (Fujimoto, & Härtel, 2017). This paper will look at how individual behaviors, leadership, and communication affect workplace diversity and organizational behaviors.

Fostering open-mindedness in an organization

One of the best ways to foster open-mindedness in an organization is to promote inclusiveness and diversity within an organization. This is done by ensuring that the workforce comprises people from various backgrounds, ethnicities, races, ages, gender and ensuring that everybody is on board. This creates high-quality business intellect and helps the organization better recognize clients, workers, and consumers globally, and make it an enriching environment for everybody.

APA problem corrected! According to Fujimoto and Härtel, “America was built upon an assortment of races and various ethnic backgrounds. The population has continued growing, and the immigrants continue to increase every day” (p. 1121). Many subcultures have been formed, which illustrates the significance of ensuring that this diversity is also reflected in our places of work. Organizations have realized that there are many benefits to managing the company’s workforce diversity. The significant benefits that are realized by the proper management of diversity are organizational performance and better people management.

Individual Behaviors of Employees

The behavior of an individual is how a person behaves. The behaviors of an individual are a very important aspect to consider when setting the accomplishment of something. For instance, in a company, the owner's behavior and the leadership sets the goals for employees to attain the goals. Behavior is the range of actions ad mannerism that is made by systems in conjunction with the environment. Individual behavior is influenced by the person’s attitudes, culture, emotions, values, persuasion, and coercion, among many other aspects.

“In an organizational setting, national culture is not the only important culture that will have an influence in the managerial and individual work behavior” (Shore et al., 2018, p. 6). APA problem corrected! The Behavior of an individual is influenced by various cultural levels. These levels will range from supranational, national and professional. Therefore, an organization should be able to integrate all these by clearly knowing that an individual's workplace behavior is a function of all diverse cultures altogether.

Individual behavior is a very multifaceted aspect since each person is different from the other. Therefore, it is a challenge for an active organization matching the tasks among the individuals depending on their behavior. However, leaders' responsibility is to use the resources that are in the company to accomplish the task that they are provided under the differences in individual behaviors and use these differences in helping increase the organizational performance. The organizational leaders are supposed to understand the culture of the worker, background area, and ethnicity of an individual so that they can be able to know the individual behavior and how these workers can be able to accomplish specific tasks in the organization to help the organization gain a competitive edge. You have many assertions above with no academic back-up.

The Significance of Diversity in the Workplace

“Diversity should not be managed, but rather it should be valued and embraced and look at ways that this can be the best use for the advantage of the organization to increase its competitiveness in the market” (Shore et al., 2018, p. 8). When leaders have behaviors that do not align with an organization's culture, most employees are de-motivated since the leaders seem to neglect the employees. A leader can be able to change the employees from bad to good, and vice versa is also true. This happens because the attitudes that the leaders show towards their employees basing the employee’s cultural background, ethnics, or minority have a big impact.

In the business environment today, demographics, talent competition, demands in the market, and the changing environment all call for a diverse workforce. The workforce is required to comprise of men and women, different ethnicities, young and old, and physically challenged workers. EEOC is tasked with the responsibility of enforcing federal laws that prohibit workplace discrimination. The commission is also tasked with overseeing and coordinating all federal equal employment opportunity regulations, policies, and regulations. Therefore, they have a responsibility to enforce laws prohibiting discrimination, providing for equal pay. How do you know what EEOC is tasked without scholarly/academic back-up? In other words, you need academic support for your assertions above.

Leadership

The effect of diversity on performance in workgroups can have both positive and negative effects. Therefore, many businesses are moving away from the age of industrial management to an era of humanity. Organizational leaders often seek to hire and retain innovative employees as a competitive advantage source (Haneda & Ito, 2018). This, thus, means that there is a need to change the leadership competencies.

The Significance of Leadership Behaviors in Organization Culture

Some leadership behaviors help in improving and sustaining performance at the individual, group, and organizational levels. Regardless of an organization's size, there is a dire need for leadership to maneuver through the complexities and give guidance through the ever-increasing challenges that face many institutions as they go on with their day-to-day operations.

The most crucial aim of a business is to sustain a competitive advantage, which is effective between the various stakeholders’ demands and the employees’ needs. An appropriate leadership style can influence the success and economic growth of both the organization and the workers. When a leader builds a culture of appreciation and acknowledgement on the team, the team will accept it up, and they will start recognizing one another on their own. This helps in creating a sense of community and cohesion in the organizations, which motivates every person both at the individual or group level to perform at their level best.

Leadership Styles

Various leadership styles are used, all of which aim to get the best out of the employees and ensure that they remain competitive (Learmonth & Morrell, 2017). One of the most used leadership styles that help in getting the best out of a diverse group of employees is the transformational type of leadership.

“Transformational leadership,” on the other hand, is proactively aimed at changing the culture of the organization culture by implementing new ideas for the workers to achieve their objectives. This leadership style motivates employees to meet their targets. This leadership style focuses on people where they inspire them, allowing them to focus on the good of the company. This they do without the use of power or authority but rather through followers being inspired by their leaders through their passion and deep thinking. Assertions?

Transformational leadership is focused on maintaining the day-to-day running of the business. Transformational leaders typically use incentives to motivate the workers to work to their best. This essentially means that workers are rewarded for exchanging rewards for the excellent work they deliver. The leaders' focus in this leadership style of leadership is ensuring that there is a smooth flow of operation today without the worry of what happens days to come in the market. Assertions with no scholarly back-up!

The leader in this leadership style goes past the daily operation management, where the managers come up with strategies to ensure the company's positive performance and the team. This type of management ensures a company builds a workers' change accomplishment aimed at the company’s betterment. When working as a team, the team members will always love this type of leader as these leaders primarily focus on the growth and well-being of the people he is leading and the community they belong to. This means that the leaders give their team members an ear since they take them as partners and not subjects.

Since their leaders give the employees a listening ear, it allows them to air the views and their ideas regarding the organization. This in return increases cohesion and collaboration amongst the workers. This leads to creating a company culture where people feel that they are also essential, and they are valued. The result is that people are free to share their ideas and everything else that they feel needs to be addressed. This leads to a steady flow of innovative ideas and gradually leads to efficiency and success.

These kinds of leaders transform the employees from lower rungs and put them at the top through equipping them with the necessary skills and knowledge. The leaders therefore look at the need of the employees grow them, and their well-being. These leaders can take a humble approach and turn the business model upside down as opposed to them being served by those traditionally considered to be beneath them in the chain of authority.

Communication

It is very critical for any organization to have a structure of communication that can be relied on. The last thing that an organization can wish for is a Communication failure. However, it is devastating that many businesses have not managed to put in place accurate communication makeup and end up failing horribly. Emad, you need academic support in this paper because of the many assertions! We discuss this in both of the lectures.

Effects of Poor Communication

Poor communication’s cost is not known. However, it is anticipated that poor communication leads to the loss of billions of money. Therefore, it is crucial to have in place suitable communication structures that accommodate every employee in the organization. This can be created by ensuring that there is a good environment that allows every employee, regardless of their background, to contribute to the organization's goals and objectives.

Effective Communication

With an effective communication climate, workers want to spend more time together and discuss many things about its success. No one will like it when a person they are talking with does not care about the discussion (Anwar, 2018). This is a similar case in interpersonal communication.

Interpersonal communication happens in the place of work for a variety of reasons. For instance, when a leader is communicating the company's goals and the company's objectives, it is required that the leader effectively does this, and the goals and objectives are defined explicitly. Therefore, communication climate should be fashioned based on the people's feelings towards each other during communication. If the actions taken due to the communication match the intended purpose, then that kind of communication is effective as the other people accurately received the message.

According to communication accommodation theory, people must emphasize and minimize the social difference between their interactions (Bovée & Thill, 2014). In enhancing and maintaining the existing climate, it requires that there is openness in the communication responding frankly and spontaneously to people and situations. Empathy is very important in ensuring that there is a good and effective climate that accommodates everybody. This is critical as it makes communication successful since every party can fit in the other person's shoes.

With empathy, a person will be able to understand the thoughts of the other person. This shows that there is value for the other party. It also calls for confidence between the parties involved. If one of the parties is not comfortable with the other person, and the communication environment might not be the best. The sense of contact referred to as immediacy is also very crucial. Complaining and aggressiveness, on the other hand, can disrupt a good communication climate.

Every leader must think of ways that we can use to be able to adjust our communication so that they feel that they are well involved in the communication process. Honest communication is essential to responsible thinking in making decisions, as well as relationships develop. When one, for example, is dishonest in the workplace, the results will be complex in the workplace, ruin the business's reputation, cause deception of trust and destroy the business. In the places of work, seniors sometimes make decisions without digging deep into the facts. They may blame junior employees simply because they did not consult something, and they thought they have the final say.

This communication breakdown can bring about mistrust between the workers and the administration, which will, in turn, lead to the reduced performance of the business because of the communication barrier between the two parties. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to ensuring that diversity is maintained in an organization. This is primarily because some workers have out-of-the-ordinary needs compared to those who have distinctive gifts.

It is vital to have in place policies that cultivate inclusion. This means that the company’s policies will help it acquire, develop, and attempt to retain women in their positions where the company aims to have a certain number of women and minority groups in its workforce by a particular year and how this will be achieved. This will help improve and promote women and minority groups to senior positions in the global workplaces. Anti-bias training is also an essential factor that helps take all the workers to take the lessons that will prevent unconscious bias. This will help in reinforcing equality and eliminating all types of discrimination in places of work.

Conclusion

Workplace diversity is a growing and vital subject that any organization needs to educate its employees and prevent issues from arising in workplaces. This diversity concept in a workplace is critical since it promotes collaboration among individuals regardless of any underlying factors. In the business environment today, demographics, talent competition, demands in the market, and the changing environment all call for a diverse workforce.

As outlined above, leaders are supposed to ensure that policies, practices, and cultures in the organizations allow every employee to feel that they belong irrespective of their backgrounds (Shore et al., 2018). It is all about valuing people who they are and what the employees bring to the organizations rather than focusing on the employees' differences. There should be an intention of overcoming the unconscious bias. Notwithstanding the progress that women have made in the world, there is no single country that has achieved gender equality. It does not matter whether we are from east, west, north, south, poor, or rich, the issue of inequality affects us all, and we should therefore fight it together.

APA problem – page break needed to land on the reference page and prevent it from moving up and down! Corrected

References

Anwar, M. N. (2018). Acquisition of skills for listening comprehension: Barriers and solutions. International Journal of English Language and Literature Studies, 7(3), 50–54. https://doi.org/10.18488/journal.23.2018.73.50.54 APA problem corrected - capitalization!

Bovée, L., Allen, C., Distinguished Chair, P., & Thill, J. (2014). Business Communication Today Professor of Business Communication Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Global Communication Strategies. https://www.pearsonhighered.com/assets/preface/0/1/3/5/0135891809.pdf

Fujimoto, Y., & E.J. Härtel, C. (2017). Organizational diversity learning framework: going beyond diversity training programs. Personnel Review, 46(6), 1120–1141. https://doi.org/10.1108/pr-09-2015-0254

Haneda, S., & Ito, K. (2018). Organizational and human resource management and innovation: Which management practices are linked to product and/or process innovation? Research Policy, 47(1), 194–208. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2017.10.008

Learmonth, M., & Morrell, K. (2016). Is critical leadership studies “critical”?. Leadership, 13(3), 257–271. https://doi.org/10.1177/1742715016649722

Shore, L. M., Cleveland, J. N., & Sanchez, D. (2018). Inclusive workplaces: A review and model. Human Resource Management Review, 28(2), 176–189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2017.07.003

Emad, The content and analysis in the paper are good. You were able to capture the materials needed for the paper. However, there are many assertions in the paper without academic back-up. You have to ask yourself how you know this information and if it came from other materials, they need to be cited because you are not the expert in that field. You have been in my class before, and I know that I brought this to your attention. Now I know that you might not be able to capture everything with a citation, but you need to make a better effort. Please do not change the title of the assignment on the second page.

I made changes in the paper to help it to flow better. You will need to match this paper up with the original to understand what I changed and why. There are problems in the APA, and many of them are the citations. You keep adding a comma to the first author. It is not authorized in the APA 7th edition or any of the editions. Please stop doing this. If you look at the sample paper references that I placed on the blackboard, you will not see that comma in the citations. I would be happy to meet with you in a WebEx session if you do not understand something. Push forward to the next paper, and I will see you in class on Monday. Be safe, Dr. Ross.