Multicultural Workforce In the past American business experienced few examples of multicultural workforce. Due to globalization large companies and small businesses are experiencing a growing multicultural workforce. These cultural changes are contributing to business success and at the same time affecting teamwork and communication.
A multicultural workforce is one in which a company’s workers come from various ethnic, racial, religious, and gender backgrounds. In the past business leaders in the United States had limited experience working with a multicultural workforce and little was written or taught on the subject. However, today’s business owners, managers and corporate executives recognize that culturally diverse workforces contribute to success.
A diverse multicultural workforce boosts a company’s success by bringing new ideas and ways to enhance decision making, creativity and innovation, marketing to foreign and ethnic minority communities, and distribution of economic opportunity. Researchers believe that most cultural challenges arise from three basic cultural preferences; how individuals approach work, how individuals share information, and how individuals view time. The researchers believe these three preferences have an enormous impact on teamwork effectiveness. However, cultural differences can be a factor contributing to increased costs when higher turnover rates, increased interpersonal conflict and communication breakdowns occur.
The United States has historically been an immigrant nation; the population consists largely of people of immigrant origins. The traditional view toward immigrants has been that they would wish to assimilate to the dominant Anglo-Saxon population of the nation’s earliest colonial settlers. Instead, groups from all over the globe arrived bringing with them various distinct cultural