Multicultural Organizations: The Role of HRM and Adult Education

This essay explores the essence of multicultural organizations, defining them as entities where individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds collaborate to create and distribute products. It emphasizes the crucial role of Human Resource Management (HRM) in designing the organizational interface to accommodate cultural diversity and highlights the application of adult education principles, such as "continuing learning," to foster a compliant and inclusive environment. The essay outlines key characteristics of multicultural organizations, including equal opportunity, networking, and the development of a unique sub-culture, and explains how adult education can act as a regulatory tool in shaping this sub-culture. It also discusses the growing importance of multicultural organizations due to globalization and the emergence of a cosmopolitan culture, highlighting the need for learning temperament and adaptability in employees to ensure organizational success and sustainability. The essay references several scholarly sources to support its arguments, including the work of Cox (1991) and Toarniczky (2011).

Multicultural organizations
The onset of globalization and other essential factors gave rise to the existence of Multicultural
Organizations, the basic definition suggests that a multicultural organization is an organization
where individuals belonging to different cultural backgrounds and education levels comes
together to share their skill-based outputs in a controlled environment to create and distribute a
product catering to a particular segment group (Cox, 1991).
This definition has great relevance in while designing the HRM interface of any multicultural
organization. It is important to understand the clause of the “outcome for a particular group.” In
order to meet this demand and creating an environment that is full of compliances, the HR
machinery takes a resort in some of the fundamentals derived by the framework of adult
education. “Continuing learning” is one such practice that has relevance with the characteristics
of a basic multicultural organization (Toarniczky, 2011).
Characteristics of a multicultural organization
Multicultural organizations thrive mainly on the principle of equal opportunity to all, in more
precise terms an expert can define it as pluralism (Barakoska, 2013). Networking among the
employees after bringing down the cultural differences is another crucial area for the
development of a multicultural organization. The principles of adult education, particularly the
framework of the “continuing learning” prevails here (Characteristics of High-Performance
Multicultural Teams, 2015).
The methods to teach a youngster and an adult person are different. Youngsters learn the lesson
first and explore the worth of the lesson in life. An adult on the other hand first explores the
worth of the lesson with the help of their life experience and then accommodates them in their

systems. The development of knowledge pools inside an organization allows consistency in the
growth of the organization. An education consisting of cross-cultural values and expressions is
necessary for it.
The concepts of adult education related to select the “high text intervention areas” and “low text
intervention areas” of education is another practice that can be adopted from the books of adult
education.
A unique and distinctive organizational sub-culture is an important characteristic of a
multicultural organization. Adult education can act as a tool of regulation in the development of
this subculture. A separate module for Adult education for a multicultural organization can be
developed and presented as a part of the organizational culture to create a sustainable
organization (Cox, 1991).
Why multicultural organizations have become the need of the hour
Most of the businesses and the promoters of the goods want to scale up their operations with an
intention to cater to various cultures. At the same time, a new cosmopolitan culture is also
emerging in the world where an individual can carry the elements of his own cultures while
joining the league of the world citizens. The existence of multicultural organizations is creating a
subset of knowledge and subcultures to support this major change which is taking place in the
world (Characteristics of High-Performance Multicultural Teams, 2015).
This major change in the social engineering of the world demands various inputs from the
fraternity of adult education. The basic concepts of adult education promote the culture of
learning temperament in a human being devoid of his age and previous experiences. Apart from
the basic skills needed for the delivery of a composite product, this temperament of the learning

is an important requisite for the sustenance of multicultural organizations which has become the
need of humanity.

References
Characteristics of High-Performance Multicultural Teams. (2015). TMC ,
http://www.tmcorp.com/Perspectives/Global-Advice/Global-Advice/80/vobid--553/.
Barakoska, A. (2013). MULTICULTURALISM AS IMPORTANT CHARACTERISTIC OF
CONTEMPORARY EDUCATION. International Journal of Cognitive Research in
science, engineering and education, Vol 1, No1.
Cox, T. (1991). The Multicultural Organization. The Executive,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4165006?seq=1.
Toarniczky, A. (2011). Socialization within multicultural organizations. Corvinus University of
Budapest, http://phd.lib.uni-corvinus.hu/624/2/Toarniczky_Andrea_den.pdf.