Voice of the Minority Workers in the Workplace - A Literature Review Based Study on Women and Ethnic Minority Workers

Abstract

Purpose: Employees’ voice has emerged as an important issue in the work place as it can significantly impact their engagement and productivity as well as performance of the organization as a whole. Though, demographic heterogeneity and effective voice communication mechanisms for all employees irrespective of gender, ethnicity and other aspects are an integral part of high-performance Human Resource Management systems and may contribute a lot to enhance performances in the organization in many ways, the failure to ensure synergy among these group may result in rather a negative effect on overall organizations. Whenever majority employees get the opportunity to gain their interests through their leaderships and related roles and the minority are deprived of getting their legitimate or even minimal facilities, they start to consider themselves only as a worker rather than an integral part of the overall organizational structure. This isolated feeling keeps them apart from thinking for the betterment of the organization. This is the most common scenario for women in most of the organizations which psychologically puts them into a corner of the organization with the course of time. The same happens for ethnic minority and especially black employees because of the absence of institutional focus on them to provide them necessary back-ups to express their voices. This main purpose of the research is to identify the salient issues of voice and silence of the employees who are minority in the organization based on their “gender” (i.e. woman employees) and ethnic group. Methodology: The main research methodology incorporated in this paper includes study and review of existing academic papers published based on the empirical studies conducted elsewhere in the world. Analyzing the papers from various search repositories, it has been tried to explore the basic issues and the salient reasons of their silence along with the measures proposed in previous studies. This research also tries to come up with recommendation for uplifting the voice and silence of employees. Findings: The major research findings recommend that, the best way to uplift the voice Women and ethnic minority employees is to create awareness of their rights as well as providing them back-up support by trade unions and other inter and intra-organizational groups concerned with the minorities. At the same time most of the literature put emphasis on the organizational concerns for bringing the minority employees into main stream to provide them the maximum opportunity to express their voice with complete participation. Most importantly, the research finding suggests incorporating Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as a tool for promoting the voice of women and ethnic minority people.