Personality and cultural differences are very common in the workplace. This is because a worker cannot get along with all the other co-workers and the supervisor. It is however important that workers and managers, regardless of their levels, to understand that there are bound to be differences in the work place due to conflicting personalities and cultures and that they can be used effectively to make them into a productive team .This report will deal with the aspects of culture and personality and how it impacts the workplace.
Personality refers to the set of unique individual characteristics of a person, which includes their values, attitudes, emotions and interests. The personalities of workers have a great determination of how they act and they can be placed into five broad categories. These categories include: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. With all these different personality traits, there is bound to be differences. There are different cultures in the workplace as well. Culture is composed of several things and may include things like assumptions, beliefs, values and attitudes that each individual at the work place has.
It is important that there be team work in the workplace because of several reasons. Some of the reasons are delegation. Team work enables the, manage to distribute work to all the members of the organization, so that no one is burdened with all the work and the work is also done fast and efficiently. Another reason is that resolving conflicts become much easier. The most important is that the goals of the organization that feel like too high to achieve by an individual, make it achievable with teamwork (Fisher, 1993).
Ways to enhance positive impact and minimize negative impact . One of the effective ways of coping with the personality traits in the work place is to ensure that the workers you hire can fit in to the culture of the organization. The recruiting team should consider slotting in a vetting system that can help reduce the chances of employing somebody who will later have a negative impact on the organization. The managerial team should also organize team building activities once in a while. This will give the employees a field to interact with others, thus fostering the relationships among themselves (Holman, Howard and Sparrow, 2003).
Such activities could include a sports day, or lunch together. Another team building strategy is the setting of goals. Give your teams easy goals to start with. Once they achieve them, raise the bar a little higher. Every time they achieve one goal, recognize their efforts and reward them if possible. Furthermore, the manager should encourage the people working under her to communicate openly. This will build confidence in the workers because they know that their opinions will be considered and slowly build loyalty.in addition, when conflicts arise, however small they are, should be addressed before they fester and become full blown. It is much easier and less costly to address conflicts when they are still small and also restore the confidence of employees.
In conclusion, form the above discussions it is clear that personality and cultural differences can be used very effectively to achieve job satisfaction. The different ranges of skills, knowledge, resources that these different workers come with are put into use and a project is viewed from every perspective and a solution comes up with.
We live in a world that has competition for talent, has demands in the market place and the working environment changes every day. The cultural and personality differences are what make a team diverse and it is this diversity that makes a strong team to deal with such issues. A team that has diverse people is far much more able to achieve a lot, than a team with people who have similar backgrounds.
