哈佛格式范文

Diversity and global manager

Introduction

In today’s hyper-complex marketplace, every organization confronts the challenge on how to take the most advantage of the international trends to promote the overall efficiency and effect of businesses and maximize profitability. In fact, diversity has become an overwhelmingly important trend that attracts global attention, especially the human resource diversity. Generally speaking, it is a crucially important fact on organizational performance that weather the employees at all levels are well-trained, dedicated and loyal at their works. The first section demonstrates the key benefits and drawbacks of diversity, which are important for the decision-making of all companies. In the second section, the traits of global managers and their significance are discussed, which are professional background, profound management experiences, global insights and extraordinary leadership. In the last part, the link between diversity and global managers is analyzed from two aspects, and several recommendations are proposed accordingly.

Diversity

Diversity can be seen everywhere and the processes of most operations have a close relationship with diversity. From the very beginning, materials and manufacturing devices are outsourced from foreign regions to make commodity, advanced technology and inventions are bought to production in many ways, then, multinational workforce take their works in teams and solve problems together, in addition, attentions are paid to specific cultures to attract consumers in different countries and promotions are designed in accordance with habits of the target consumers of different nationalities.

Diversity is so significant in resent days that any company can do nothing but come up with great ideas to manage diversity and take the most use of the trend. Diversity management emerges as a result of the rapid process of globalization, especially in the human resource sector such as age, religion, race, gender, culture and specialty,

consequently, it is not appropriate to implement a fix managing code in today’s world. It is believed that diversity can promote organizational performance as well as contribute to high efficiency.

Positive aspects

There are many sound reasons for creating a more diverse employee profile (Causon, 2008). The most obvious ones are presented as follows.

Gathering diverse insights

It is common for any company to confront many problems arising from manufacturing, promotion, recruitment and management, which may hinder the company from gain market opportunities (Samad, 2001). Although most challenges are solved by managers and superior officials, the decisive and tough ones need the insights and ideas that come from diverse workforce at all levels. Firstly, from a regional perspective, workers from the western country come up with creative ideas while east country workers come up with relative rational solutions. Secondly, with previous colorful life experiences, some workers can relate certain problems to their real-life experience and bring insights to teams. For example, it is well known that a technology named brainstorm is widely used by managers to tackle certain time-consuming problems, one of the vital elements to gain best results is diverse wor

kforce with various specialties. Therefore, workforce diversity in a team makes communication with each other, exchanging perspectives and refining ideas possible.

Making full use of various abilities

Cox and Blake (1991) view diversity as a businessimperative and highlight that firms should understand how they valuediversity to establish a competitive edge over their competitors, Therefore, by setting up jobs properly and developing workers in response to the changing nature of work, a company can make the most of workforce diversity and enhance its competitive strength (Stolarski and Tilebein, 2009). Generally speaking, tasks that has to carry out in a prescribed way to an approved standard can be distributed to workers who are serious-minded and responsible, however, workers who are reactive and creative are in charge of new undertakings outside the worker’s formal duties according to the situations. For instance, if a worker who once was a painter hopes to find a job in a shoes manufacturing company, he can still have a try in the designing apartment although his previous experience seems unrelated to shoes manufacturing. Radically high efficiency can be achieved as long as jobs are divided into specific sections according to the abilities of workforce with precise job description and responsibility.

Preparing for global competition

Workforce diversity is a significant advantage for any company whose aim is making brands work around the world.cross-cultural management become crucial if organizationsare to understand how to serve and retain a customer base that is much more diverse and demanding than in the past (Bergesen and Sonnett,2001). Firstly, the first-hand experience and latest information gathered from diverse workers, whose values and thoughts resemble the target consumers’ in the same region, only by gather adequate information about customers’needs and wants can a company create customer loyalty and strength customer base. Then, the acquaintance of local conditions and personal relationship that workforce diversity provides are especially useful in the strategic design for a new product promotion. Thirdly, customers in a

certain region inclined to give feedback to workers who share the same value and religion with them, with timely feedback information successiveprogress and better organizational performance can be achieved, and the company is bound to gain competitive advantage and maximize its profits.

Negative aspects

With the positive effects workforce diversity has on organizational performance above, attentions must be paid to adverse effects relating to workforce diversity, which are listed as follows.

Bringing conflicts from different backgrounds

One common characteristic in a diverse team is that every individual has dissimilar even adverse views on one issue; this phenomenon exists because national culture is a major barrier in a diverse team. On one hand, conflicts show on how to carry out works, most workers are comfortable with their cultures characterized by leisure and freedom and prefer to work by self-motivation and have flexible working time, in contrast, some workers are exposed in cultures embodied by disciplines and stander,and therefore, they tend to hold precise responsibilities. On the other hand, conflicts arise when team members disagree with others’solutions. Although it is crucial for everyone to contribute their ideas and insights in every possible ways, too diverse suggestions will become useless and complicated for relative simple and urgent matters.

Consumingresourceto coordinate

From an overall view, organizational performance declines as conflicts consume too much resource, including time, energy, money and human resource. There are three causes. To begin with, there is a specific time schedule for assignments taken by employees so that managers are able to arrange the whole workload organized and comprehensively, however, training and coordinating diverse work force tend to take a relative large amount of time and drag down the normal operational process because

it is not easy to make a comprehensive set of regulations and laws to tell various workers how to act and achieve their goals, and efficiency drop as resources are spent to communicate with team members on disputes, which have a strong bond with workforce diversity. Secondly, various working equipments as well as advanced software have to be installed in accordance with the working style to fully contribute to the working efficiency; however, diversity workforce makes it impossible to meet everyone’s requirements.

Global managers

With the rapid growth of international operation, there exists a huge demand for the global managers who are capable of dealing businesses across the country boundary.

The characteristics of global managers

Profound management experiences

Facing with the increasingly complex challenges of the marketplace, a manager with profound experience in management can inspire and guide groups and people. Being the top managers of an organization, one has to considerthese challenges within his or her problemsolving expertise and great energy, which can take more than three months to remain the organization operating effectively and efficiently. when facing conflicts inside a team, the supervisor has the responsibility to solve it in a way that does not break down the team spirit or ignore the benefits of any individual involved, and this requires the high emotional intelligence. The leader with profound management experience can deal with the problem carefully and organized, so the conflicts can be handled properly, and there will be no great damage to the overall organizational performance.

It is known that people are characterized by social contacts and emotional communication, especially in a team, people are exposed in various reactions and coordination, consequently, it is necessary to motive and organize people in an appropriate way depending on the situation and characteristics of the involvers, a

great manager should be familiar with the characteristics of the team members, and integrate their interests into the overall interest of the team, which means the manager must improve their emotional intelligence in order to motivate different kind of work force, at the same time, set various controls for different levels to maintain a high productivity.

The most well-known theories on leadership include Great Man Theories, Trait Theories, Behaviorist Theories, and Situational Leadership. Trait Theories lists of traits and qualities that are related to leadership. Behaviorist Theoriesrefers to the fact that leaders can be divided into various types according to their different patterns of behavior (DeRue and Nahrgang, 2007). Situational Leadership means that the reaction of leaders mainly depends on the environment he or she is in.

Global insights and leadership

Managers should make the management style adapted to the changing working environment and needs of subordinates to achieve high efficiency, and that needs global insights (DeRue and Nahrgang, 2007). Possessing the vital trait, a manager will deal with the organizational bottlenecks with many factors bear in mind, which include giving them more choice balancing their recent operations and the long-term strategies, to achieve the development objectivities (André Martin, 2007).

Extraordinary interpersonal skills

The ability of understand and react properly is of great importance to a manager, which is one component of emotional intelligence, not only in the process of assigning tasks, recruit and training but also in the process of assessing, motivating and controlling (Chirstyn Dolbier and Mike Soderstrom, 2001). Any global manager who is professional at management knows that most employees need different training programs to get familiar with their rights and responsibilities, at the same time, different ways of assessment should be implemented to workers at all levels according to the nature and characteristic of works ,by doing that, they can emphasize various aspects of job outcomes.

The link between diversity and global managers

As the world has become flat and interconnected, many international companies intend to expand operations to every profitable region. Therefore, they face two main challenges. On one hand, they should take advantage of the context of diversity to develop an increasing number of global managers, who are in great need worldwide. On the other hand, it is a priority to manage diversity with different background to run business effectively and efficiently by the dedication of global managers, who possess a variety of talents and experiences.

Conclusion

In a word, adequate attention should be paid to diversity and the demand of global managers, it is a long-term task for any company to take the most of the globalization and grasp the opportunities brought by it.

Reference

AndréMartin (2007), The Changing Natureof Leadership, Center for Creative Leadership, vol.2007.

Chirstyn L. Dolbier & Mike Soderstrom (2001), The Relationships Between Self-Leadership and Enhanced Psychological, Health, and Work Outcomes,The Journal of Psychology, vol.135(5), pp.469-485.

Causon, J. (2008), The diversity advantage - [management employment], Engineering & Technology, vol.3, no.18, pp.78-82.

DeRue D. S.& Nahrgang J. D. (2007), Trait and Behavioral Theories of Leadership: A meta-analytic Test of Their Relative Validity,Personnel Psychology, vol.2007.

Stolarski, V. & Tilebein, M. (2009), Diversity as a KnowledgResource in Top Management Teams - A Framework for Agent-Base Modeling, System Sciences, vol.2009, pp.1-10.

Samad, S. (2010), Unraveling the different effects of quality and humanresource management aspectson organizational performance,Information Management

and Engineering 2010, vol.2010, pp.162-165.