Surviving Fast-paced, Unpredictable, International Business Environment

Diversity in management classrooms is advocated not for the sake of it, but as an experience that impacts who you are and what you do in the workplace…

- Prof. Kim Menezes

In today’s globalized multi-cultural business environment, diversity at workplace is common. More often than not, employees are working in teams comprising people from different countries, cultures, socio-economic backgrounds, educational backgrounds etc. Such a diverse work environment can create significant challenges to overall team performance and organizational effectiveness if employees do not have adequate exposure and training to work with people from different backgrounds.

Shared vision

It is well known that high-performance teams require a common and shared understanding of the vision and what needs to be accomplished. Typically, organizations have one corporate language and employees who are less fluent in the language of the majority are unable to express themselves effectively and are not understood by the people who are fluent in the corporate language. This can result in these employees feeling isolated and excluded from the rest of the group, their contribution to the task at hand can suffer and overall team performance can be negatively impacted.

Diversity of languages