Question

Please discuss how a leader’s role and responsibility change as a company might becomes more diverse? When and how would you know when and if it were time to change? Do you think we will learn anything about our attitudes or actions regarding diversity and acceptance from the COVID-19 experience?

Answer 1

Diversity in an organization plays an important role in increasing productivity and efficiency. As the company becomes more diverse the leader needs to change his/her roles and responsibilities to manage the diverse workforce. If the diverse workforce is managed successfully then it leads to more committed, better-performing employees and by this the overall financial performance will increases.

In a diverse organization, a leader must guide, manage the whole diverse team to improve the productivity & effectiveness of the team. The leader must know about the likes, dislikes, interests & disinterest of every team member so that the leader can delegate the task in an effective manner. There are various theories that tell how should a leader manage a diverse team. According to the Leader-Member Exchange theory, each team member should be treated individually because in a diverse team everyone's qualities are different. This theory highlights two groups In-group & Out-group.

In a diverse team, some members are more hard workers and always want to do some extra works from there job description. So, these types of people come in In-Group and they have good relations with the leaders. The In-group members are always more productive and satisfied with there work, job, etc. Whereas in the Out-Group, members work only what is assigned to them and they are not focused on productivity and effectiveness.

So, the leader should take care of all the team member's likes, dislikes, etc and assign the task as per there interests, skills & capabilities. Also in a diverse team sometimes the biases regarding religions, race, color, come and a leader should always be active to show these changes and act accordingly to avoid any issues among the team members.

Yes, as the COVID-19 originated from a single country and its natural people in the other country will be biased to the people to that country. In some countries, peoples will not accept the members of their team from that country.