Chapter 13: The Diversity Challenge

In this blog i am going discuss about the importance of diversity at workplace and how a leader can achieve the positivist through diversity and how a leader can avoid its negativity.

What is diversity? The concept of diversity encompasses acceptance and respect. It means understanding that each individual is unique, and recognizing our individual differences. These can be along the dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, religious beliefs, political beliefs, or other ideologies. For more understand you guys can see this website http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/diversity/definition.html .

Characteristics of the mainstream culture in the United States

•Individualistic and egalitarian

•Pragmatic and hardworking

•Action-oriented and data-based

•Amenable to change

•Diverse

•Workforce in the United States is composed of more minorities, recent immigrants, and women than ever before

•Currently, two-thirds of global migration is into the United States

•One of the major changes in the workplace between now and 2050 will be the demographic picture of the labor force

Mainly diversity is describe as: Broad term that encompasses many differences, including:

Age
Disability status
Military experience
Sexual orientation
Economic class
Educational level
Personality characteristics
Lifestyle

IMPORTANCE OF DIVERSITY:

  • It creates innovation in the workplace
  • Brings diverse talent ans skills.
  • Approach to new ideas.
  • Helps to grow the talent pool of your workplace.
  • Brings inclusiveness and open environment.
  • eventually helps to increase employee performance due to welcoming environment.

BENEFITS OF DIVERSITY:

  • Increase in workforce creativity
  • Broader range of knowledge and skill
  • Better decisions based on different perspectives
  • Better services provided to diverse populations
  • Ability to recruit excellent talent from the entire labor pool

GENDER DIVERSITY IN THE WORKPLACE:

Participation of women in the workplace continues to increase:

•Leaders must address the changing workforce and the needs of women

•Increasing numbers of women are occupying C E O positions in corporations

Natural differences exist in the way men and women communicate:

•For most men, report talk is primarily a means of preserving independence or negotiating and maintaining status in a hierarchical social order

•For most women, language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport

Age difference is an important dimension of diversity

  • Today’s cohorts and their different attitudes and expectations
  • Veterans: Represent a treasure of experience and wisdom
  • Baby boomers: Value economic security and are focused on social conditions
  • Generation X: Expect less job security and are motivated by work-life flexibility, the opportunity to learn, and egalitarianism
  • Generation Y: Tend to be tech-savvy, racially and ethnically diverse, multitasks, and independent
  • I Generation or Generation Z: Use social media extensively and view rapid social change as a constant.

Positive and Negative attributes of outstanding leaders: Here’s the positive and negative attributes of a leaders which shows there exact image that what kind of a leader they are.

Firstly positive:

  • Trustworthiness
  • Intelligence or skill
  • Excellence oriented
  • Administratively skilled
  • Motivational ability

Negative:

  • Dishonesty
  • Incompetence
  • Ruthlessness
  • Irritability
  • Egocentricity

Leadership and Diversity: Diversity and leadership go hand in hand…

Effective leaders have an integrative approach
Leaders bring together and integrate people of different cultures, races, genders, personalities, and stages of development into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts
Integration is a building up in which the identity of the individual is preserved yet simultaneously transcended
Effective teams that result welcome other points of view, embrace opposites, and seek to understand all sides of every issue.

Thank you for visiting my blog. Hope you guys enjoy it and learn the key elements of diversity. stay connected for more information.

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