Cummins: Encouraging Diversity In The Workplace

Cummins functions through their network of company-owned and independent distributor facilities in more than 190 countries and regions. This understandably means that Cummins employs and interacts with people from all cultures . Encouraging diversity and inclusion allows organisations to recognise countless benefits to productivity, performance and ultimately profit. Eliminating the social barriers to recruitment and preserving community groups can increase employee satisfaction and efficiency leading to a business utilising their full potential. However, diversity makes communication problematic not only due to physical or environmental barriers, but also due to a difference in cultural belonging and understanding. When people belonging to

Diversity and inclusion have been included in Cummins’ missions and values for over 40 years, with several of our business goals linking increased diversity with global success and growth. Former CEO J. Irwin Miller remarked that “Character, ability and intelligence are not concentrated in one sex over the other, nor in persons with certain accents, or in certain races, or in persons holding degrees from some universities over others. When we indulge ourselves in such irrational prejudices, we damage ourselves most of all and ultimately assure ourselves of failure in competition with those more open and less biased."

In the Profitability reporting team itself, the majority are from the US, but with a mix of 9 other countries from east to west (figure 3). Our different cultural attitudes and norms could affect our reporting strategies, and our relationships with each other.

7.2. Cultural Dimensions

Dr Geert Hofstede published his cultural dimensions model based on a decade of research in the late 1970s. Since, it has become an internationally recognised standard for understanding cultural differences. It consists of six

In fact, we tend to minimise cultural differences, which leads to misinterpretation and miscommunication. As Joynt & Warner said, “Culture is the pattern of taken-for-granted assumptions about how a given collection of people should think, act, and feel as they go about their [lives]” Hofstede’s model illuminate these differences, with the tool being used as an approximate understanding towards other cultures, and become respectful in cross-cultural relations, which is very important in an business. They should be used as a guideline only, as the country scores on the dimensions are relative, in that we are all human and simultaneously we are all