The Impact Of Managing Diverse Employees

As the workforce of Ghana continues to be diversified, both in public and private sector, the relationships between heterogeneous work groups and performances have been researched and explored. Many results of such researches have been inconsistent as it has shown that diversity leads to both diminished and enhanced functioning. Managing workplace diversity in Ghana has become a major concern among organizations. Managing diversity in organizations is an essential function of the organization as there is the changing demographic composition of the workforce. Varying approaches to managing diversity have been employed by organizations which have yielded varying organizational outcomes. Within the diversity management area, researchers have call for a more theoretical development. In multilingual workplaces, communication practices and ideologies vary hugely. Many companies in one way or the other include diversity management in their corporate culture simply because there are empirical and theoretical reasons to believe that when a company employs a diverse workforce, its opportunities in the global market is enhanced, employee satisfaction and productivity is also improved. Managing and accepting cultural diversity have been touted and promoted positively as a tool in an organizational and social engineering that has solving and preventing group dynamics problems as its objectives both in society as well as business organizations. In the past two decades, fair and significant attention is given to positive attributes of cultural integration in business organizations. The pitfalls and challenges that are implicit in the management of culturally diverse groups have not been sufficiently presented. There is the need for the practicing manager to know where and when multi- and mono-cultural arrangements may be preferred. An important issue for businesses in this era of globalization is diversity and diversity management as it impacts on productivity and efficiency of the workforce. The overall objective of diversity management is to bring out the best talents, skills, knowledge and abilities in employees for the benefit of the organization as well as the individual. No employee feels disadvantaged when workforce diversity is properly managed. In diversity management the differences and similarities of individual are valued.This paper aims at reviewing research findings that are relevant and can be used to build effective paradigms in managing a diverse workforce such as assessing the scope and impact of workplace diversity, examining approaches that organizations take in managing diversity and outlining effective strategies than can be used in creating a harmonious working relationship among culturally diverse employees. In order to achieve the aforementioned objectives, both quantitative and qualitative research methods were used to collect data. Quantitative research strategy that was used is the questionnaire method. The questionnaire is made up of two major parts(part 1 and 2). In distributing the questionnaires to respondents, the random sampling method was used. Interview, been a qualitative research strategy was also used to obtain data. Two major questions were used for the interview. With the interview, the researcher decided to use both judgmental and snowball sampling to gather the required information. Data analysis was done using the component factor analysis of the SPSS as well as using Excel.In an increasingly global market, organizations that have varied employees are in a better position to serve the diverse needs of their customers. Such organizations understand the social, political, legal, cultural and economic requirements of their environments better. This research has a three-fold contribution. First and foremost it provides an insight into the scope and impact of diversity management. The scope of cultural diversity includes but not limited to age, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, relationship status, race, religious and educational background. The impacts of diversity management on employees are a double edged sword since it impacts both positively and negatively. Positive impacts of diversity management on employees include improving the internal morale of employees, enhancing employees’ innovations with fresh ideas, making team working a richer experience. On the contrary, diversity also impacts negatively on employees. For instance, when group members are not part of the majority, the psychological commitment of such minority is low, leading to absenteeism and increase level of turnover than do majority members.