Analyzing Diversity and Conflict in Leadership within Organizations

This essay critically analyzes the statement that diversity in leadership allows managers to introduce new skills and methods for achieving unity and developing a strong culture within their teams. It explores the significance of diversity in today's multicultural workplaces, particularly in Australia, highlighting the challenges and potential for conflict arising from differences in skills, needs, and expectations among employees. The essay delves into the concept of bias, its detrimental effects on productivity, employee morale, and career advancement, and recommends strategies to eradicate it within the organizational culture. It emphasizes the importance of intercultural leadership and the advantages of workplace diversity for fostering mutual respect, targeting talented individuals, and achieving common organizational goals. The essay also discusses the role of corporate social responsibility, the need for inclusive mindsets, and provides evidence-based recommendations for successful workplace diversity programs, including fair recruitment practices, training, and the enforcement of policies against harassment and discrimination. Ultimately, the essay concludes that diversity in leadership is essential for developing a strong culture of inclusiveness, fostering creativity, and achieving business success.

Running Head: WORKING WITH DIVERSITY AND CONFLICT
Working with Diversity and conflict
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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The aim of the essay is to critically analyse the topic, “Diversity in leadership within a
firm allows managers to bring in new skills and methods for achieving unity within their teams
and develop a strong culture.” The statement is critically analysed regarding CSR, leadership and
HRM practices within an organisation. The essay briefs the bias that might contribute to the
decrease in productivity. The essay recommends the way to eradicate the same in the culture.
The term bias refers to the situation where people are drawn to others with same hobbies. In
regards to the organisational context, it might affect resume screening and career advancement.
Bias treatment largely effects the motivation of the staff and their morale. It also influences the
commitment of the employees and the desire to advance in the organisation. Thus, the purpose of
the essay is to understand why business needs to consider diversity and conflict in their business.
Australia is popular as the multicultural society. Therefore, the workplace comprises of
minorities, immigrant and non-immigrant workers, contract workers from other countries, more
women, limited English-speaking workers, non-English speaking workers, and older workers.
These workers have varied needs and expectations, and it may be challenging for the
management as they have different skill sets. Ignoring the differences in the workplace leads to
conflicts, confusion, complaints of harassments and eventually discrimination. It may hamper the
team unity. It becomes difficult for the management to communicate and coordinate with such
diverse group (Allard et al. 2017). Thus, it is essential to respect the diversity to develop a
strong culture. Intercultural leadership allows managers to bring in new skills and methods for
achieving unity within their teams.
Diversity in leadership within the firm is important for managers due to shift in the
workplace demographics and the emergence of the global market. Workplace diversity has come
close to the business necessity. Lack of workplace diversity leads to bias, that is getting attracted

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to employees of the same culture, caste, and language. In many cases, business opportunities
were found to be missed as they failed to capitalise on the mixture of genders, ages and lifestyles
(Canas and Sondak 2013). When employees without the language and cultural skills are
recruited, it will lead to the decrease in productivity and build a strong culture. Other aspects of
bias are stereotypes attitude towards particular culture, discrimination of women professionally
and bias in giving feedback (Dunham 2017). More than conscious prejudice, unconscious bias is
more predominant. HR managers in many cases were found to show bias in the hiring process,
granting leaves, thus developing the unproductive workforce. For instance, a stereotype that
black women are “aggressive”, decrease staff morale. The pay gap and lawsuits are some of the
consequences of bias (Koch et al. 2015). In my personal experience, my maternal aunt was
discriminated regarding promoting to higher designation despite being competent.
Without including diverse talent, creative ideas it is difficult to sustain competitive
advantage. It is difficult to offer more solutions to the customers due to lack of ideas. There will
be no scope for creativity, if employers are biased to take opinion and perspectives, from
employees of similar background and culture (Guillaume et al. 2017). As per the findings of
Harvey and Allard (2015), when heterogeneous groups are present in the organisation, there is an
increase in creativity due to the cross fertilisation of one another. Therefore, to achieve one
common goal an intercultural leadership can bring in the variety of solutions. For instance,
Chinese workers working in the Australian company can think different from Australians.
Consequently, it will lead to innovation. Thus, diversity in leadership is essential for managers as
the social identity of an employee effect relationship with employees. Transformational leaders
are effective in this aspect as they walk the talk and literature evidence say that it is effective in

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managing diversity. Diversify in leadership means employing, promoting and appreciating
diversity (Wang et al. 2013).
There are several advantages of ensuring the workplace diversity by the human resource
managers and senior level managers. It helps to foster mutual respect where employees working
in the team can cope with the different work styles, cultures, ideas and thinking styles. It will
help realise the significance or strength of the diversity and combating bias in feedback, payment
and others. With the help of diversity, a pool of talented brains can be targeted to achieve
common organisational goals (Moran et al. 2014). As highlighted by Allard et al. (2017)
acknowledging the differences at workplace decreases the likelihood of the conflicts. By learning
new skills to maintain, the unity in diversity decreases the potential liability of the employee
complaints. To avoid issues on litigation, it is better to preserve the high quality relationship with
the employees, supervisors, and co-workers. The study conducted by Barak (2016) argued that
the diversity, when accompanied with the inclusive culture, helps deliver high performance. It
decreases absenteeism, increases innovation and the customer satisfaction. Without developing
the mindset of inclusion, the managers will not be able to successfully implement the diversity
initiatives. Lack of inclusive mindset will cause them to behave defensively. Simply, integrating
the corporate policies such as flexible working time will not help avoid lawsuits. Inclusiveness is
necessary where employees embrace each other’s uniqueness, thus, decreasing the dissimilarity
and bias.
Diversity and inclusion are a part of the corporate social responsibility. Without
inclusion, a company may not be able to expand on to the global market. For example, if an
Australian employee can speak Japanese, he or she may not be as successful in dealing with the
Japanese representative when compared to a Japanese employee. The later may better understand

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the culture and thinking style of the foreign representative. It will be beneficial for the business
managers to learn new skills from culturally diverse workforce such as new language skills.
Further, an organisation can gain reputation by being inclusive of other communities. It will also
help promote corporate social responsibility (Barak 2016). For instance, by hiring Mandarin-
speaking employees, a company’s sales among Chinese communities can be increased. The
business and the employees will get better exposure. Thus, it is the new method to create unity
and strong culture in an organisation. Thus the given essay topic holds significant value.
When an employee fails to execute the knowledge or talent, it leads to the feeling of
discrimination and bad reputation of the company. Bias may further lead to harassment and
lawsuits. It will decrease the strength of job seekers. Workers are drawn to organisations with
fair treatment of employees irrespective of ethnicity, minority and gender (Chuang 2013).
Business may feel challenging to place an employee on different silo based on diversity profile.
For instance, it may be difficult to categorise an English-speaking employee who is 51 years old
and an atheist under a particular diversity. A human resource manger must develop leadership
quality to respond to complex human needs to develop the strong customer base. In this context,
it is justified to say that the diversity in leadership will help develop the strong culture of
inclusiveness. To fulfil the corporate social responsibility, it is necessary to cater to personal
needs of employees.
Based on the literature review, evidenced-based recommendations are effective in
making the workplace diversity program successful. It would be effective to base the decisions
of employment on job recruitment. Employees should be recruited based on the non-
discriminatory and legitimate reasons. It is possible through the provision of detailed job
descriptions for each designation. Based on the individual’s performance or ability the decisions

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related to the promotion, hiring, training, discipline, termination or demotion should be made. If
an employee has great potential, with a different skill set, a training program should be provided
after recruitment. It will help them to meet the organisation’s performance standards. Older
employees must be familiar with the behavioural interviews (Chuang 2013). The human resource
managers to learn cross-cultural communication for communicating with different sex and
culture groups; identify the do’s and don’ts of each group and ways to supervise the non-
Australians. There must be effective and consistent enforcement of the policies about
harassment and discrimination. It must be applied uniformly. In this regard, there must be a
record retention program for proper documentation of the entire investigation (Wang et al. 2013).
To deal with the cultural diversity issues, programs should be developed at the
workplace. The workplace should design policies and the procedures that will facilitate
communication with the non-English or limited-English speaking workers. However, to avoid
stigmatisation or feeling of discomfort among employers must explain the essentiality of seeking
such program and the need to fulfil the given job role by speaking English. The language
requirement should also be mentioned in the written job description (Hunt et al. 2015). Every
organisation must recruit professional translators for cases other than the investigations on
harassment and discrimination. It should be determined if the need of speaking English is only
for specific work time and the documents that especially needs translation for non-English
speaking employees. It is recommended that the new arrivals in the organisation such as
immigrant contract workers must be trained on the acceptable workplace behaviour and the
working standards of Australia. The leaders must aware the workers on the laws, values and
ethics of Australia for effective risk management. The business leaders must train the exiting
employees on the behaviour that cause harassment and discrimination (Wang et al. 2013). To

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respect the cultural diversity, culturally sensitive procedures must be adopted by the
organisation. It will help receive and process the diversity questions and problems. For instance,
it may be difficult for Aboriginals to be assertive, outspoken, and individualistic as Americans.
The managers must develop a program to resolve the family issues (such as insurance, health
issues) of the employees to make good business sense. It will help retain valuable employees. It
will help fulfilment of the corporate social responsibility For instance; AIDS awareness
programs can be initiated by the managers to promote.
The essay critically analysed the statement “Diversity in leadership within a firm allows
managers to bring in new skills and methods for achieving unity within their teams and develop a
strong culture”. Based on the analysis, the statement can be called as justified. Including
diversity in leadership will help managers to develop new language skills, generate creative ideas
in the organisation, and increase the company sales and productivity. It will lead to positive
reputation of the organisation. Without the diversity in leadership, the results may be opposite.
The essay has recommended strategies for mitigating the diversity issues in the workplace.

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References
Allard, S., Qayyum, M.A. and Mehra, B., 2017. Intercultural leadership toolkit for librarians:
Building awareness to effectively serve diverse multicultural populations. Education
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Barak, M.E.M., 2016. Managing diversity: Toward a globally inclusive workplace. Sage
Publications.
Canas, K. and Sondak, H., 2013. Opportunities and challenges of workplace diversity. Pearson
Higher Ed.
Chuang, S.F., 2013. Essential skills for leadership effectiveness in diverse workplace
development.
Dunham, C.R., 2017. Third Generation Discrimination: The Ripple Effects of Gender Bias in the
Workplace.
Guillaume, Y.R., Dawson, J.F., Otaye‐Ebede, L., Woods, S.A. and West, M.A., 2017.
Harnessing demographic differences in organizations: What moderates the effects of workplace
diversity?. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 38(2), pp.276-303.
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Hunt, V., Layton, D. and Prince, S., 2015. Diversity matters. McKinsey & Company, 1.

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Psychology, 100(1), p.128.
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