Defining What Diversity And Inclusion Mean To Me

Ng & Sears (2011) pointed another kind of leadership called “Transactional leadership.” These leaders are mainly very effective for businesses as their leadership is heavily influenced by the task management, utility maximization, and organizational legislation. They are based on exercising bureaucratic authority and legitimate power. They motivate their workforce through reward and punishment in order to make better outcomes for their business. 

Among these few leadership models, I believe “Transformational leadership” and “Servant leadership model” seems to be the best suited for creating an inclusive environment. It is because both theses models focus on things such as moral, empathy, empowerment, protecting social values which are integral part of inclusive leadership. Even though the leadership operation between both these models are not identically similar, both these models try to bring the best out of their employees regardless the differences or any legislation. Extensive research has also been conducted on these two approaches and all of them have positive findings. Inclusive leadership is quite similar and related to both these two leadership models since both the types of behavior tend to meet employees’ problems and various issues. The reasons I think the transactional leadership model is not that efficient for diverse environment is that it is heavily influenced by the company’s legislation and utility maximization. 

Thus, since they are more influenced by these factors, they are most likely to comply with policies such as the “Employment Equality Act” to avoid punishment and penalty. So, it can easily be assumed that in the absence of such legislation, transactional leaders are most unlikely to have any motivation required to implement diversity management initiatives (Ng & Sears 2011). Here it all depends on social value as it will moderate the relationship between transactional leadership and the organizational diversity practice. Another critical point is “Age” that can be a deciding factor for tackling diversity for transactional leaders (Ng & Sears 2011). It is found in a research which indicates that the “Age factor” of a CEO is related to the success of diversification as they highly intend to leave a legacy after their exit from the company which actually means that the older the CEO or the leader is the better for organization’s diversification. So, if the organization do not practice compliance and if the leader is relatively young, most unlikely the organization will be unable to manage diverse workforce. 

In shared leadership, the success depends heavily on how diverse and knowledgeable the workforce is as less diversity might result redundancy and information overlapping. However, having said that, shared leadership becomes more beneficial if the team or the organization is more heterogeneous than homogeneous (Hoch, 2014). It is due to more diversity in a team, and it is expected to have more presence of higher level of non-redundant and non-overlapping information, which is likely to be shared among the team members. So, this kind of leadership needs additional support from their team. He/she might have a vision, a sense of mission, and strategy, but this cannot be achieved without the support from the team. Inputs from teammates are quite significant for implementing this model. So, I assume that the success of this model depends a lot on the existence of certain elements without which it might not work in diverse workplace. 

Challenges of creating an inclusive workplace from leadership prospective: Putting up an effective diversity policy is the first step in order to deal with diversity for a leader (Van Ewijk, 2011). Organizations who want to be more inclusive in nature for cultural diversity may consider looking at all their organizational policies and procedures to ensure that there are no discriminatory in the system and that system and values contributes in making an inclusive and welcoming organizational culture. Even if a company wants to embrace diversity by implementing the new system, they must remove the traditional system or the rules that were discriminative. According to Van Ewijk, (2011) sometimes a group-based approaches are chosen in order to endorse the equal opportunities for individuals. Under those circumstances, measures which promote equality, apart from abolishing discrimination or biasness, are also based on the view that in many instances it is important to recognize social group differences whenever they may lead to some applicants or job holders being disadvantaged. For example, in the United Kingdom, where company policies such as career breaks, childcare, flexible working schedule, and single sex training are encouraged, even though they are not legal requirement (Van Ewijk, 2011). 

The irony of fact here is that the organizational practice or lens of viewing diversity is a major point of concern for leaders. If the company has strict policy of complying employment legislation, it becomes easier, otherwise it’s extremely hard for a leader to embrace inclusiveness in the workplace. Diversity policy enhanced work group performance. As a human resource management strategy, diversity policy provides an organization’s commitment for equal opportunities of all and to promote diversity. Diversity answers the “what” question and the policies describe the “how” portion of managing diversity in terms of how diversity management should be carried out (Jin, Lee & Lee 2017).