Personality and Disability Factors in the Multicultural Workforce, Essay Example

Abstract

The intrinsic nature of a multicultural workforce contains within in disparate, and frequently challenging, elements. Individual backgrounds regarding all aspects of each worker’s life come into play, and these always include personality components, as well as less omnipresent, but certainly to be anticipated, disability issues. Both factors, however, may prove to be instrumental in actually promoting a more cohesive and healthier workforce, rather than be detrimental forces within it. Success in managing both personality and disability elements lies in an initial and sensible approach to how they translate into the over-all workforce experience, and how potential dilemmas may in fact contribute to a more integrated and accomplished result.

Personality Factors

That personality plays an essential role in job performance, both individually and in team situations, has been increasingly studied as the vital component within business it is. “…At least twenty-five hundred US companies, from Starbucks to Apple, now assess their employees on personality-based characteristics” (Cantrell, Smith, 2010, p.74). Corporate restaurant chains administer psychological profile tests to applicants for host positions, as service stations require the same for gas pump attendants. Personality directly affects performance in every job sphere, and this is becoming universally acknowledged.

Unfortunately, as even the most state-of-the-art corporations are learning in this regard, even the most detailed personality profiling can reveal only so much, and a great deal of that is subject to variables. Personality traits are shifting entities to begin with, and the typically dominant sort of person will exhibit passivity at incalculable times. So too are personalities accentuated or diffused by those with whom they are in contact at the work place, and this is an immeasurable equation. The employer may confidently surmise that the highly aggressive worker will not be rightly placed beside someone similar. Beyond such extremes, however, the mix, even in the smallest of work groups, is too subject to variables for any substantial expectation of direct result to be had. Multiculturalism, in fact, has little to do with this inevitability.

The smartest avenue to successfully assessing and incorporating personality as a component within the workforce actually lies in both respecting it and setting rigid borders on its expression. Every worker should be made to feel that their nature and individuality is esteemed as such, but that the workforce requires an adherence to behaviors sometimes not always agreeable to personal expression. Placing the proper import on personality in a multicultural situation translates to accepting that much of it will be unknown, as well as inapplicable to the goals of the workforce. If it is nonetheless respected, however, a compliance to necessary modes of workforce behavior should be no issue.

Disability Issues

Perhaps more so than with any other potential problem, the multicultural workplace with an active policy of employing the disabled is opening its doors to a variety of benefits not immediately foreseeable. All persons in the workplace must as a consequence find themselves echoing the attitudes of the workplace and broadening their own perspectives about the disabled in the process. This can only lead to a stronger bond between employees and a more harmonious, and subsequently more productive, workforce.

While procedures, guidelines and physical implementations of access for the disabled to work effectively are essential, the most pivotal aspect for real success in blending this element into the workforce emanates from the people, the workforce, itself. “One of the lessons learned from the disability movement is that the employment of disabled persons depends upon reducing the attitudinal barriers to employment” (Hunt, Berkelium, 1992, p.63). Time and again, disabled employees point to this as the most crucial factor in their employment, that of attitude. Condescension is not desired, nor is excessive and unnecessary accommodating of difficulties they themselves know how to surmount. It is in how they are perceived and treated, and the vastly preferred manner is that of how their fellow workers are treated.

With healthy and positive attitudes in place, the multicultural workforce must inevitably profit from a greater mutual respect at play within it. In this way disabled employees elicit a broadening of behaviors the workforce should enact to all concerned.

References

Cantrell, S., and Smith, D. (2010.) Workforce of One: Revolutionizing Talent Management through Customization. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press.

Hunt, H. A., and Berkelium, M. (1992.) New Technologies and the Employment of Disabled Persons. Geneva, Switzerland: International Lab our Organization.