Cultural Diversity

Cultural Diversity

General competencies required to successfully work in a culturally diverse workplace

Since the past few year important changes in the amalgamated workforces have taken place with organization working on becoming diversified on the personal characteristics, out of these the most important is cultural diversity. (Shaw and Barrett, 1998).

Talking about cultural competency of individuals, it is defined as the state of capability to function effectively and efficiently in the differences context. (Jack Gavin and Robert Westwood, 2009). Trainings for enhancing the cultural competence, human relations, and race relations have been there in one form or the other for around 20 years. (Chang, 2002).

If we consider past fifteen years organizations along with public and private corporations have inducted this type of trainings in the regular curriculum of their staff development programs.(Zanoni, 2006). This is not only in the theory but organizations like Proctor and gamble and unilever and many other giants have injected these well designed diversity programs in to the DNA of their the overall procedures and routines of their entities.

Now the question is what does it look like? As Alan Richter, CEO of QED explains “One side of cultural competence is being able to deal ambiguity, the more you deal it the more you get effective, it's adaptive in nature.” When it comes to cultural diversity it's not only ambiguity you dealing with but also the complexity. From the eye of a cultural expert it is the ability to switch cultural paradigms. Cultural competence is the acceptance of not knowing and the temptation to learn what you don't know, also to be able to understand what others are expecting of you. It's also about the conflict management skills, as an author of resolving conflict management says that a critical skill for enhancing the cultural competence is the ability to see things from others perspective. Still experts suggests that its absurd to believe that one can get able to identify completely but still he can get capable of empathizing the person of the other culture. To master this at a possible level the only skill is enhance the questioning and listening and to demonstrate the understanding derived from it.

In order to achieve this skill set, competencies in the literature identified as crucial to the cultural competencies are being provided. Before getting on with these competencies which benefits the employees to work in these diversities we must first be clear about what exactly competence is. A famous definition states it as “It is the skill set, knowledge and attitude which individuals possess.”(M Phillips, 2004). Still after this clear definition many researchers often use skills and competencies interchangeably.

On the basis of extensive researches done on the subject, researchers were able to identify some key competencies based on three categories behavior, affection and cognition. Affection is about a person's emotional response to situation, behavioral is about the behavior shown and cognition is about his capability to process information. Such classification of the competencies has made it possible to quantify the level of competence of ...