The Impact of Cultural Diversity Within the Hospitality & Tourism Industry

Diversity is a wonderful asset to an organization and brings with it many benefits. Employees bring in their own personal experiences and knowledge to the team (Burns & Kerby, 2012). Having diverse teams allows for the possibility to fix a problem or perfect a process by using different employee’s experiences and past knowledge to find solutions. A diverse workforce can drive economic growth and capture a greater share of the consumer market (Burns & Kerby, 2012). With diversity as a core value, the recruitment pool is widened to find the most qualified candidate and reduces employee turnover as a result. An organization can be highly competitive with a diversity initiative by adapting to a changing environment (Burns & Kerby, 2012).

When companies hire diverse employees from different cultures they are making their company stronger and more marketable. Whether a company is just starting out or been in business for while they need to realize that diversity needs to be part of their business plan going forward. The global marketplace is built upon many different cultures from all around the world. Companies today need to be able to interact with each other in order to increase sales and promote their products to clients globally as well.

Those that go into the business world quickly recognize that each work environment they find themselves in can be total different from another. This can especially be said even of environments within the United States, from region to region. There is definitely a disparity of workplace environments from country to country. Not only can culture drive a varied atmosphere, but the diversity of the personnel making up that environment can equally create a challenge that a leader must be prepared to manage. Recognizing that special care needs to be placed on communication and perception skills is crucial in our present professional domain. Managers of today need to employee tools from the psychological and sociological field to be successful. Having a deep understanding in the differences in culture and diversity in the workplace is critical, especially when debating about accepting a position overseas or assigning an employee to an embedded position abroad. With a broad knowledge of cultural differences and diversity, success as a manager and the stability of a positive work environment can be achieved and maintained without unnecessary effort and focus.

Diversity acknowledge that people are differ in many ways, such as age, gender, social status, disability, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity and culture (Kossek, Lobel & Brown, 2005). Nowadays, diversity has increasingly become the most valuable aspect of HRM areas. Develop countries such as Australia and New Zealand hold multicultural workforce as one of the most important dimension of diversity, where there are a large number of international migrants with different cultural backgrounds (Shen, Chanda, D’Netto & Monga, 2009). Studies from McLeod, Lobel and Cox (1996) and Wilson & Iles (1999) point out that a diverse workforce has a better-quality solution to brainstorming task, display more cooperative behaviour, and can raise organizational efficiency, effectiveness and profitability. Hence, utilization of diversity allows organization to increase the organization cooperative behaviour and competitive advantage (Cassell 1996). However, in groups where people from different cultural and ethnic background are working together, differences may occur in management styles, attitude towards hierarchy, approaches to group work, and ways of expressing

It is very important for leaders and managers to embrace a diverse workforce. Because diversity could possibly add influence to the market share, and could widen the talent in the recruitment process for the organization. In addition, the organizations could benefit from the various perspectives and experiences; for example, different races, gender, and age groups within the workforce. However, a diverse workforce might also be challenging; for instance, leaders and managers may spend too much time in promoting

Organizations must stop visualizing diversity as an issue and start seeing it as a benefit for the organization. There are several reasons why a diverse workforce will add value to a company. Most businesses, either large or small, work on a global scale; the information age has brought the entire world a lot closer. Having associates that can deal with different cultures around the world is crucial to an expanding business. A diverse workforce will help to build more rounded individuals with experience they will gain from a mixed environment. Customers will benefit from the diverse workforce because a company that makes a choice to be open and flexible with its associates will more than likely be easy to work with in a business relationship. Probably the most important aspect of having a diverse workforce is the vast knowledge gained by pooling the different life lessons, cultures and experience together thereby allowing everyone the chance to learn new and different business practices (Sappal, Pepi, 2002).

Myrtle P. Bell explains that diversity recruiting demands a supportive climate (Andrew Greenberg, 2013). It is because the corporate profit will cut down significantly and pessimistic consequences definitely exist without the supportive environment. Inequality, underestimation and even exclusion persist of individuals, groups, organizations and communities turn a working environment into distressingly. The implementation on diversity is very hard due to its avoidance are complex and not often likely recognizable. For instance, foreign men are more possible to be a higher position which relates to leadership side, such as managing director, administrator or board members. The commitment of those foreign men towards diversity is very important

If an organization is serious about leading and managing a diverse workplace, they must prepare a plan of managing cultural diversity not only for the current status of the diversity in their organization but also for the very starting point of accommodating new employees with different cultural backgrounds. It is all about the preparation for recruiting different cultural backgrounds.

Managing diversity within a company is an important task that can have a major effect on a business. Diversity is measured in different aspects such as supplier diversity, affinity group diversity, employee diversity and technology diversity. The most common area of weakness in diversity with companies is employee diversity. This area of weakness has been a steady controversy for many large and small companies. Not every company struggles with diversity issues, in fact some companies exceed in being a diverse business. Not only does diversity factors like innovation, enhanced creativity, and cost savings benefit a company but it also puts them in favor with the public eye. Past controversies have shown that diversity can play a key factor in

Broad definitions seek insertion, but do not allow for identification of the differences between functional and social diversity. These differences make the organization confused and leave it in unclear state, as a result most diversity management program adopted fails due to lack of reliability in the definition of diversity. The impacts of diversity in the workplace can be both positive or negative. Some negative effects include dysfunctional conflicts, lost productivity, and difficulty to achieve synergy in group settings. Positive effects include a strong knowledge and skills base created by a variety of cultural experiences, an in-house resource of cultural trainers and informers, and greater readiness to expand the business international and globally. For the most part, the effects of cultural diversity in the workplace depend on how well they are being managed by the organizational leaders. With the right strategic planning and commitment, top management can enhance the positive effects and reduce the unfavorable effects of cultural diversity in the workplace. After analyzing many research work and business report on this topic, we found out that diversity have no absolute effect and can only be judged by the way it’s implemented. It need joint and integrated effort starting from the top management to the non-managerial levels, supervisors should lead employees the right way, coordinate and stay available to any conflict or diversity problem. After doing all your best you can eventually judge the diversity plan and evaluate how successful was it, because no generalization can be

The general line of reasoning is that if we learn to incorporate each other’s diverse traits and characteristics in the workplace, we can then use these differences to foster an innovative environment, which will give the company a competitive advantage over the competitors that do not accept workforce diversity. According to the Allied Academies International Conference, “Diversity is rapidly becoming a common practice among companies due to the increasing number of minorities entering the job market today. As these groups become more prevalent throughout companies, upper-level employees are facing numerous challenges when determining what changes must take place to create a positive working environment for everyone. Management is responsible for the development and implementation of effective policies directly relating to diversity to ensure the acceptance of minorities into the workplace and to aid in minorities’ success through equal opportunities and treatment.” (Marcia L. James, 2001, Academy for Studies in International Business Proceedings)

In today’s society there are many culturally diverse people in the workforce. Most organizations can no longer make the assumption that every employee has similar beliefs or expectations. When entering into the global marketplace, people are considered one of the most valuable resources to an organization’s success. A well-managed culturally diverse workforce has the potential to thrive if managed correctly; or if mismanaged, there can be devastating negative attributes. With great expectations, culturally diverse employees can foster positive outcomes in the workplace. A company’s acknowledgement to embrace diversity and change, and implement the value of management techniques are

Organizations have been becoming increasingly diverse in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality. This diversity brings substantial potential benefits such as better decision making, greater creativity and innovation, and more successful marketing to different types of customers. But, increasing cultural differences within a workforce also bring potential costs in higher turnovers, interpersonal conflicts, and communicational breakdowns. The utilities of diversity training and the essential managerial skills required for effectively managing diversity will also be discussed.

The workplace has become one of the biggest multicultural settings. Almost half of the work force in the United States is made up of minorities. There are many advantages to having this percentage of people from different cultures throughout our workplace. One is the increase in creativeness. Not only in products that are being created but in the developing of an approach to solving problems. "Other cultures can offer insightful alternatives" (EthoConnect). Another way in which the workplace is affected by this is in productivity and attitudes. When people of all cultures pull together to reach a common goal there are less limited boundaries and there are more global understanding that are used to help reach the world's market place; creating a larger market for products. With this change in productivity in the workplace is more desirable and enjoyable for all employees. The market place has become more global based that workers having a diverse culture base is very important to break down barriers in language and knowledge of certain markets. This affects our lives by more companies hiring more international job seekers.

Many opportunities are associated with a culturally diverse workplace and global expansion may have potential to provide just such a diverse work group. Cross-culturalism in business can provide leaders and employees with a wonderful opportunity to work with people from different backgrounds and cultures. In addition, “the more opportunities for business leaders to interact with people from different cultures, the more likely they will be to have positive attitudes from different cultures and identify, learn and apply diverse culturally-appropriate business behaviors” (Caligiuri & Tarique, 2012, p. 614). Culturally diverse environments offer a multitude of benefits including “the variety of perspectives, skills and personal attributes” (Matveeve & Nelson, 2004, p. 254). Moreover, multicultural teams have potential to “generate more ideas of higher quality in brainstorming tasks” (Matveeve &