Cultural Diversity and Organizational Behavior in Indian Context

ABSTRACT

Workforce diversity is what every person generally is. Which is “different”. Diversity makes a workplace assorted. It has become a necessity to organizations. Through this short write up we are trying to relate the importance of workplace diversity, its effects/advantages and major challenges it faces in Indian context.

KEYWORDS: Diversity, organizational behavior, workplace, India.

INTRODUCTION

India is developing and it is changing at a very high pace, with more people receiving higher education and joining the workforce every year. Growing India requires people from all walks of life to come together, work and think collectively. People are coming out of their comfort zone of working in traditional spaces. With more and more competition coming from all parts of the country, diversity has become something very crucial to surviving the market competition. Diversity helps organizations to understand the market well and give their customers the utmost satisfaction.

In simple terms, diversity in India can be described as people from all walks of life. For examplegender, socio-economic group, age, caste, color, creed, geographical locations, values, beliefs, language and political orientation.

Effects of Diversity at workplace

1. It helps build a sound knowledge base:with their own in-house talent which ultimately helps the organization to understand different cultures well.With the presence of people from different ethnic groups and cultures, people come up with great ideas from their own experiences and perspectives which might help the organization to solve their problems in a better manner.

2. Improves productivity:A diverse workforce with new ideas motivates the employees to be more efficient and effective.

3. Creativity:A diverse workforce, coming from various backgrounds, wouldbring newer, more creative solutions to the table. This would help the organization in realizing and achieving its goals more efficiently.For example, an advertisement company requires a lot of creativity and brain storming. If the workplace is not diverse the employees may think similarly, but in a diverse workplace, a person from one particular geographic location may approach a completely different approach to solving a problem than a person from a different place. Together they would be more efficient than they would have been separately.

4. Improves interpersonal skills of the employees:Companies plan to continuously expand to new markets (e.g. within a country like India), where the differences of culture and language would be significant barriers to their growth. In such cases a company with a more diverse workspace, where its employees are already familiar with the new cultures, would be able to adapt to these changes much faster.

5. Satisfying the needs of the customers in a better way:A better understanding of lifestyle, customs, and religious belief in a cross cultural environment helps anorganization serve its customers better.

6. Prevents discrimination:In a multicultural diverse workplace people get to meet people from all walks of life every day and get to know them well. Such an environment fosters tolerance and prevents discrimination in the future.

7. Opportunity:Diversity gives employees a scope of better growth in personal and professional life. It actually helps people to develop new skill set and develop new working approach and developing a network with people across various locations and what not.

Challenges of workplace diversity

Whileworkplace diversity has many positive aspects, it also has some disadvantages or rather, it would be