Companies will need to look at regional and national differences, and draw on the similarities between countries to enhance their competitive advantages (Powell, 2005). It is clear that as company, like WTI grows globally, they will benefit from a multicultural workforce. They must put managerial, educational, and cultural proactiveness in place, which will not only improve their opportunities for greater worldwide competition, but by bringing establishing a multicultural workforce, they also improve the interrelationships between their employees. Employees who do this, learn to communicate and other points-of-view and opinions. By doing this WTI, and other large companies, poise themselves to become successful in the emerging globalize culture of the 21st century.
Using Innovative Human Resource Techniques to Manage Diversity - Human resource management, whether specifically titles or not, has been a part of any organization's management since groups banded together for specific tasks. Ancient armies, projects, and even educational and religious institutions all had concerns about their ability to bring in the appropriate person for the positions at hand. Formally, Human Resource Management in the contemporary world is both the tactical and strategic manner in which an organization manages the human portion of its resources, both collectively and individually, and how management of those individual resources contribute to the overall positive objects of the business (Armstrong, 2006). Over the past few decades, though, and with the advent of increasingly sophisticated technology, Human Resource management has changed from using people to employ people, develop people, and track the utilization and compensation of their services. Instead, a newer system has evolved using computers, database management, and data mining to provide more optimal ways in with the Human Resources department can move to more of a Personnel Department, playing a major role in staffing, training, and helping to manage people within the organization in order to strategically recruit, train, and retain the best people who will work towards the company's strategic goals. This new form of management is titled eHRM, or Electronic Human Resource Management (Boudreau, 2007).
However, eHRM is not simply using computers to recruit and assist in the hiring of staff. It is the planning, implementation and application of the full use of appropriate information technology for both networking and supporting a specific group of people in their shared performance of Human Resource activities (Strohmeier, 2007). In effect, it is taking a technological premise and deconstructing that Human Resource portion to individual managers and employees. These actions are typically allowable through the Internet or a company's own servers, and are not the same as simply the electronic tools used to manage people systems (Lepak, 1998). By greater empowerment of managers and employees to perform certain functions that are more appropriate for their own department or area, HR staff is allowed to focus less on the operational and more on the strategic functions of their job. So, too, the expertise in specific areas is more appropriate to vet certain candidates based on a specific body of knowledge -- one that a traditional HR representative may have little or know working knowledge (Cullen, 2001).
Generally speaking, there are at least three levels or eHRM: Operational, Relational and Transformational. Operational eHRM focuses...
Diversity in the Workplace The increase in globalization has resulted in greater levels of interaction of individuals from diverse cultures and beliefs than ever before in the history of the world. As noted in the work of Green, Lopez, Wysocki and Kepner (2002) "People no longer live and work in an insular marketplace; they are now part of a worldwide economy with competition coming from nearly every continent." (p.1) Diversity is
The enforced smiling of Wal-Mart employees at taciturn German customers, and the fact that no one at the company realized "that American pillowcases are a different size than German" pillowcases, leaving Wal-Mart Germany "with a huge pile of pillowcases they couldn't sell to German customers" are examples of how an informed and nuanced cultural understanding of a nation is demanded to succeed in a global environment (Schaefer 2006). On a
Kizilos and others showed that diverse organizations portrayed reduced pro-social organizational behavior compared to homogenous groups, and Pelled and others, showed proof that increased standards of ethnic diversity are linked to more emotional contradiction in organizations. Riordan and Shore showed that in diverse organizations, employees are less considered to be committed or view that they are prone to grow in the organization. (Pitts; Jarry, 2005) With this contextual understanding we
Diversity Global Awareness and Cultural and Racial Diversity The need to successfully promote global awareness and cultural and racial diversity took on a completely new meaning recently. "There are over six billion people on this planet we call Earth. Diversity is more than just a notion. The term diversity has been defined by Merriam-Webster online as meaning 'differing from one another or unlike. Composed of distinct or unlike elements or qualities', this
Multicultural Workforce Multiculturalism is rapidly becoming the norm in today's business climate. Globalization has forced companies to begin marketing worldwide and the result is that companies must diversify their workforce in order to successfully compete on the world stage. Companies such as McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Google, General Motors and many more have all entered the globalization era by diversifying and creating a multicultural workforce. A multicultural workforce can mean different things to different
Diversity The Impact of Diversity on our Current Society The workforce and the society in general, in the United States will continue to diversify among racial groups. Although many organizations are fully aware of the trend, there have been some gaps among this trend and the preparations that need to be done to manage a more diverse workforce and nation. It has been estimated that roughly two thirds of U.S. companies have
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