Question

West Coast Architects (WCA) has been operating for the last ten years now. No longer the new kid on the block, the organization has steadily become more professional during your time here. Five years ago, the company had 50 employees and now has grown to 100 staff in Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto. You have been successful in your career as a people manager practicing what you learned in your many years ago. You are managing an HR Department that is based out of Vancouver and has a mixture of recruiters, HR consultants, and payroll staff. You silently take stock of your situation and marvel at how lucky it has been to grow with a company that has really appreciated your contributions. That brass name plaque on your office door could use some polishing as its developing some patina!

question

WCA has just sent a dozen (mostly white male) managers from Canada to its new site in a remote area of China. Few of these managers have worked with Chinese employees, so the company has asked you to design an on-site one-day experiential training program to help these managers to minimize perceptual problems that might otherwise occur. The program must be experiential (i.e. participants interact with each other rather than attend an awareness lecture) and the activities must help the managers to discover biases that may be hidden or unknown to them. Describe a minimum of two key features of this training program and discuss its conceptual foundations.

Answer 1

When different people having diverse backgrounds, religions, ethnicity and so on work together, it can be seen as the example of workplace diversity and it results in the barriers in terms of communication and language and the conduct of the business. It is important for current managers to possess cultural competency. This will ensure the success of both the manager and the organization. This will indicate that the manager has the capability of interacting with the people belonging to varied cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds. It will also be used to find out the capability of the manager to work with those employees who do not have the common languages, beliefs lifestyles and so on.

It is important to have an experiential training program that will be used by the managers to reduce the perceptual conflicts that could manifest and the two important factors in this are as below-

· To have a better understanding of the ethical sensitivity that creates better empathy among the individuals

· Enhancing the perception of the manager by implementing the Johari Window Model and the contact hypothesis. This will improve the understanding of relationship of the people with others and their perception