Workplace Diversity and its effects on team dynamics and productivity

Abstract

This essay examines workplace diversity, focusing on the recently discussed growing challenges. In light of the demographic differences among employees in terms of age, gender, race, ethnicity, and culture that typically influence productivity and business performance, such a diverse or heterogeneous work environment is largely a result of trade liberalisation and globalisation, which enable productive factor inputs to travel freely between countries. The inclusion of workforce diversity comes with some benefits, such as the formation of a collaborative and team-based learning environment, better productivity, and higher profits. It is important to be aware that there are certain new problems with workforce diversity, such as a multicultural work environment, a vast talent pool that may be leveraged for innovation and creation, inter-functional coordination, complexity, and workplace discrimination. Globalisation, migration, the ageing population, outsourcing, women's employment, etc. all contribute to these problems. An organisation should have a framework for managing workplace diversity; this will allow for the best resource allocation to build a multicultural workforce that is engaged and productive. Keywords: Workplace Diversity, Discrimination, Globalization, Multicultural, Inter-functional, Team Participation