Cultural Dimensions Of Diversity

Conflicts are often responsible in intimidating people, making them lose confidence in their abilities to effectively interact with one another. Those conflicts that involve cultural differenced can bring anxiety to people. Most of the time cultural differences are obvious. And it`s stated that cultural differenced infuse every conflict (Avruch & Black, 1993). In a group of culturally homogeneous members also represents a wide variety of cultural beliefs. Cultural value, beliefs, and attitudes are not evenly distributed across members of a cultural group. It can be seen how those team members who are culturally different perceive the conflict. What might seem bizarre to one group of people may be normal from another culture`s point of view.

The are two obvious ways in which people identify themselves and respond to other people: gender and cultural diversity. But it should be remembered that diversity is seldom limited to one type of difference, age and profession are also important dimensions of diversity. Although all dimensions of diversity can create more communication difficulty for team members, not all types of diversity affect a team`s interaction in the same way. The most likely way to encounter the conflict is truth team members who differ on characteristics important to the task, for example disagreement about goals, decisions, and procedures. Teams have to negotiate these disagreements and having team members with different task or activity expertise generally increases the ability of the team to perform effectively. A team is more likely to have emotional conflict, if cultural diversity exists in it. There conflicts are characterized by interpersonal clashes and members often experience anger and frustration. Different dimensions of diversity create different types of conflict in teams. It is difficult for people to understand the point of view of people from cultures different from their own. Unless an individual has a great deal of experience in working in diverse groups, it is easier to rely on stereotypes about culture race, and gender that to interact with people as individuals (Keyton, 1999, pp.

Identification of their own reactions and assessing the interactions of other team members, proactive decisions can be made to influence team`s positive response to cultural diversity. One of the most obvious and common problems in diverse teams is unequal participation. Often team members from the majority culture dominate the team`s interaction, at the expense of members from minority cultures. Is cultural differences are emphasized this way it can cause team members to overestimate their similarity to members of the same culture and to overestimate their differences from members of other cultures. This type of exclusion occurs in two different ways: verbal, when majority team members start conversations only with other members who are similar to them, and non verbally, when majority team members physically turns away from minority group members as if to direct interaction only to certain group members (Keyton, 1999, pp.