MANAGING DIVERSITY IN ORGANISATIONS TO GAIN COMPETITIVENESS

Organizations the world over is increasingly finding themselves coping with the changes taking place in their environment. There are two sets of forces that are changing the once familiar organizational landscape increasing reliance on teams and the changing workforce. This is bringing more and more people from diverse backgrounds into contact with one another. In general, diversity refers to the ways that people in organizations differ. That sounds simple, but defining it more specifically is a challenge because people in organizations differ in many ways-races, gender, ethnic group, age, personality, cognitive style, tenure, organizational function, and more. Managing diversity means establishing a heterogeneous workforce to perform to its potential in an equitable work environment where no member or group of members has an advantage or a disadvantage. Effectively managing diversity helps organizations to identify and capitalize on opportunities to improve products and services, attract, retain, motivate and utilize talented people effectively improve the quality of decision-making at all organizational levels and reap the many benefits from being perceived as a socially conscious and progressive organization. The paper attempts to analyze the mechanism of leveraging and unleash the powerful benefit of a diverse workforce in work organization.

A Successful Three-Phase Metaheuristic for the Shift Minimization Personal Task Scheduling Problem

Workforce scheduling process consists of three major phases: workload prediction, shift generation, and staff rostering. Shift generation is the process of transforming the determined workload into shifts as accurately as possible. The Shift Minimization Personnel Task Scheduling Problem (SMPTSP) is a problem in which a set of tasks with fixed start and finish times must be allocated to a heterogeneous workforce. We show that the presented three-phase metaheuristic can successfully solve the most challenging SMPTSP benchmark instances. The metaheuristic was able to solve 44 of the 47 instances to optimality. The metaheuristic produced the best overall results compared to the previously published methods. The results were generated as a by-product when solving a more complicated General Task-based Shift Generation Problem. The metaheuristic generated comparable results to the methods using commercial MILP solvers as part of the solution process. The presented method is suitable for application in large real-world scenarios. Application areas include cleaning, home care, guarding, manufacturing, and delivery of goods.

Working Longer but Not Harder: The Effects of Incentivizing Inputs versus Outputs in a Heterogeneous Workforce

To address the empirical phenomenon that organizations often reward time on the job as an end in itself, we design an experiment in which participants solve anagram puzzles, manipulating whether a compensation pool generated from the output of paired workers is allocated based on the individual inputs of relative time spent or on the individual outputs of puzzles solved. Relative to an output-based allocation, we find that an input based allocation leads participants to spend more time on the task. However, when paired participants have widely different abilities, an input-based allocation also leads to less effort intensity, defined as puzzles solved per unit of time spent. We attribute these findings to fairness considerations, an interpretation we corroborate in a second experiment with purely individual incentives that finds the same effort duration advantage of input-based pay but no offsetting disadvantage in effort intensity.

Exploring the theoretical link between cultural and emotional intelligence: A system analysis for human resource management

In light of increasing globalisation and a changing workforce, the ability to bridge cultural fissures separating diverse groups will be increasingly critical to sustained work place well-being, especially with relation to global competitiveness and economic growth. This article explores the link between cultural and emotional intelligence in an effort to investigate the possibility of measuring, developing, and effectively managing individual responses to cultural influences that give rise to significant tension within the organisational context. Since South Africa’s heterogeneous workforce is characterised by culturally diverse group interaction, the conceptualisation of a cross-cultural facet of intelligence with emotional-management as reciprocal component has practical implications towards optimal intercultural organisational harmony, effective globalised interaction and overall group-dynamics.