Ethnic Diversity and Service Delivery.

Ethnic Diversity and Service Delivery.

For organisations to attract a broader talent pool of employees, it needs to embrace an organisational culture of workforce diversity. This will lead to an enhanced corporate reputation and strengthened cultural values. According to Childs (2013), workforce diversity is a global workplace and marketplace phenomenon. Therefore any business that intends to be successful in the service delivery must have a borderless view and an underlying commitment to ensuring that workforce diversity is part of its day-to-day business conduct. Workforce diversity includes, but is not limited to: age, ethnicity, ancestry, gender, physical abilities/qualities, race, educational background, geographic location, income, marital status, military experience, religious beliefs, parental status, and work experience (Srivastava, 2012).

Organisations hire employees from diverse countries, cultures, values and styles. While employees expect returns from the organisation, their effective performance is significant for its success. It is therefore important to consider the effect of diversity on employee output. Workforce diversity could present tremendous challenges as well as opportunities to the organisation in terms of effective management. The following are some of the challenges that diversity could present to an organisation; individual versus group fairness, resistance to change, resentment, group cohesiveness and interpersonal conflict, segmented communication networks, backlash and competition for opportunities (Madiha, 2013). It is therefore important to understand the impact of diversity on organisational outcomes, such as organisational performance, employee satisfaction, and turnover (Sungjoo, 2010). There has been an increase in multicultural workforce in the organisations for utilizing greater participation and synergy to improve and increase both employee satisfaction and business performance. This increase is due to multicultural increase of our society. Ethnic diversity is highly relevant in an increasingly globalized world. It is a current fact of life. A moderate level of ethnic diversity has no effect on team performance in terms of business outcomes, that is, sales, profit, and market share.

However, if at least the majority of team members is ethnically diverse, then more ethnic diversity has a positive impact on performance (Sander, Hoogendoorn, Mirjam van Praag, 2012). Ehimare & Oghene (2011) empirically explore that ethnicity is insignificantly negative in its relationship to both employee productivity and performance. Ethnic diversity would benefit team performance due to a more diverse pool of skills and knowledge that leads to complementary and mutual learning. For example, due to complementarities and learning opportunities, ethnically diverse teams are associated with more creativity and innovation (Alesina and La Ferrara, 2015; Lee and Nathan, 2011; Ozgen, 2011).