Managing Cultural Diversity

Cultural diversity can be defined as having different cultures respect each other’s differences. The phrase “cultural diversity” is also sometimes used to mean the variety of human societies or cultures in a specific region, or in the world as a whole.

Team Diversity

Team diversity is the significant uniqueness of each individual on a team. This not only includes religion, sex, age, and race, but also additional unique personality characteristics such as introverts and extroverts, liberals and conservatives, etc. All of these differences can affect team interactions and performance. However, not all differences affect team performance.

Apart from that diverse teams have different challenges, benefits, and pitfalls than homogeneous ones. The main advantage is that a diverse background fosters a creative environment where on the other hand the major drawback is that differences between team members can lead to destructive violence. The differences that are most commonly thought of as separating diverse teams from homogeneous ones are easily observed stereotypes.

List categorizing the physical and social differences that most frequently create a diverse environment,

1. Gender – Gender communication issues can strongly affect team interactions. Gender communication issues can range from communication styles and perceptions, opportunities and even sexual harassment.
2. Race – Race is defined as a group of people, often of a common geographic origin, that share genetically transmitted physical characteristics. Racism is the belief that these inherited characteristics affect an individual’s behavior or abilities.
3. Cultural – Culture refers to the standards of social interaction, value and beliefs from a given group of people. Cultural issues can affect team interactions through different understandings of communication or family and can appear to be an excuse for preferential treatment.
4. Age – Age can be a concern along the entire spectrum; is someone too young or too old to do a job. It also creates the potential for communication problems based on different levels of experience, and for prejudicial treatment based on age.
5. Sexual orientation – With the increasing visibility of gender minorities such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, there are increasing workplace issues. From simply not understanding gender differences, to being morally opposed to them, sexual orientation can create blocks to productive team interactions.
6. Disabilities – Differences in ability often create difficulties in communication and emotional interactions. Whether it is a deaf individual not being able to communicate with hearing individuals, or a hearing individual being unsure of how to approach a deaf individual, disabilities present a variety of issues in team organizations.

Diversity can also be defined as an increased likelihood for a wider range of views to be present, which includes views that are likely to challenge widely accepted views of the team and its culture. The existence of these diverse views is essential to the process of organizational change. In addition, as teams are becoming increasingly global, diversity can help an organization or team to understand its place in its surroundings.

Some of the differences inherent in a diverse team environment also cause challenges. The benefits of having diverse backgrounds do not occur without having team members that are dedicated to success and a common goal. Simple misunderstandings can arise from basic cultural differences, communication styles or work attitudes, and create challenge. The diversity in teams has benefits but creates challenges as well. But having awareness of these challenges and procedure to address them, teams and team managers can overcome them and reach success.

Managing Diversity

Team leader should consider diversity as diversity of ideas and experience, not just race and gender. A leader needs to recognize the diversity of each team member and achieve unity of common goals without destroying the uniqueness of any person. The team leader must do this within the scope of the organization’s resources relative to the growth of the team member.

Majorly the problems in the work place are not that people cannot do their jobs but people cannot get along with others at workplace. Therefore the team leader should make efforts in effectively training soft skills. This includes such subjects as diversity, communication and people skills that allow people to understand each other and develop good team skills. It is required that every team member must not only be able to understand and work with all the other team members, but they must also want the same internally. The process of embracing diversity is the first step to managing a truly diverse team. Thus to facilitate this, team leaders should consider,

1. Must build an atmosphere in which it is safe for all employees to ask for help. People should not be viewed as weak if they ask for help. Joining weakness with strengths to get a goal or objective accomplished is one aspect of building great teams. One person’s weakness should be another person’s strength.
2. Try to seek information from people from a variety of backgrounds and cultures in order to develop a broad picture.
3. It should include everyone on the problem solving and decision making process.
4. It should include people who are different than you in informal gatherings such as lunch, coffee breaks and spur of the moment meetings.
5. It should aim to create a team spirit in of which every member feels a part.

The team leader must enables the other members to be innovative as well as self-directed within the capacity of individual assignments and allows them to learn from their own, as well as others successes, mistakes and failures. It is important to ensure that each individual on the team has the opportunity to make the maximum contribution to the success of the team by doing the type of work for which s/he has the greatest opportunity for productivity and achievement.

Often leaders are assigned the task of using the other team members’ diverse gifts, abilities, and skills to achieve the common goal without the unintended consequence of conforming to the characteristics the others on the team. This requires active management by the leader to insure that diverse followers show respect and acceptance of the followers that are different in one way or another.

In case  team members do not accept others for what they are, they will be unable to use the abilities of each team member to fill in their own weak areas. Therefore, the team effort develops knowledge and skill gaps that often lead to failure. Their sole objective becomes the ones on their personal agendas while ignoring the needs of the team and the organization. Creating an environment that encourages diversity enables team members to accept every individual on the team and helps them realize that it takes a variety of people to become the best. This kind of environment also enforces the need to rely on everyone within the team, no matter how different another person may be. These characteristics and experiences make a worker unique. Primarily, diversity appears in the system when the whole team sees all these unique characteristics, and realizes that workers are more valuable due to their differences.