The Threats and Opportunities from Diversity in the Workplace

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Recommended: Cultural differences in cross-cultural communication

Workforce diversity can be define as a person that work in a firm that come from different nationality. Not only different nationality but from different background, different age, racial and also a person that came from different gender (http://www.slideshare.net/kumudu737sjp/workforce-diversity). In other word, a company or an organization are becoming more heterogeneous mix of people in term of gender, age, ethnicity and sexual orientation (Naik, 2012). When we talk about workforce diversity, there will be threats and opportunity to a firm. Surely the workforce diversity can give a lot of opportunities or benefits to a firms. The opportunity that this diversity can give to a firm are increase the firm creativity, increase their productivity, attracting new customer and can develop a language skills between the employees of the company.
What are means by increase the firm creativity are through subordinates that comes from different background that work in an organization that came out with different way of solving the problem faces by the firm toward achieving a good solution. The more ideas firms gain from different people, the easier the firm get the solution for their problems with a good or alternatives way of solving them.
The increase of productivity of the firm can be gain because of the mixture of the workforce. When the people of all culture pull together towards achieving the goals, the firm can be success because of globalization and internationalization.
Diversity in a workforce can diverse the customer base. It is happen from the contribution of specialist skills and cultural awareness from the staff. The staff that come from different country has different cultural backgroud so that a firm that do business globally can gain success because the staff can understand the customers needs and want in each country. Language skills are important in order for a company or a firm to communicate with different company in different country. Eventhough English can be said as the worlwide communication language but to build the good relationship with other people of the world, we must know their language. This can become an advantage for a firm that have diversity of workforce as the employee can help the firm to understand their words and also the meaning behind those word
(Lee, 2004).

Workforce diversity also can give threats to a firm in terms of discrimination and stereotyping. Discrimination can happen when it come to nationality. When a firm hire a workforce from other country in a small quantity the workforce will become a minority groups in that firms.

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