This assessment task requires that you synthesise your understanding of organisational culture and leadership with your theoretical and practical knowledge of OB in Australian organisations. The focus of this activity is to determine how the practice of OB must be redesigned and realigned in multiethnic/multicultural contexts to ensure cultural appropriateness and to achieve organisational effectiveness.
Scenario
Australia has one of the world’s most culturally diverse workforces. Managing different cultural workgroups has ongoing implications on the success of the organisation. However, cultural differences leading to conflicts caused by ineffective communication and increasing moral and ethical degradation at workplaces continue to be issues of growing concern. Furthermore, as the workforce becomes more diverse and multigenerational, labour power may force improvement in the employment relationship and call for different kinds of leaderships. Recently, exploratory studies conducted in Australia have examined the blend of leadership styles/behaviours that different cultural workgroups preferred their managers to exhibit.
Using both literature and publicly available data:
1. Identify and critically analyse and discuss the communication challenges that a leader would expect to encounter in relation to the cultural diversity of many Australian organisations.
2. Critically discuss how leaders can address the ethical issues related to the cultural diversity in many Australian organisations.
3. Identify, synthesise and critically discuss an optimal mix of leadership styles/behaviours which would be aligned with managing culturally diverse workplaces; these should be sufficiently flexible, and able to be appropriately adopted in Australian organisations.
Rationale
The purpose of the assignment is to build up a specific understanding of managing a multicultural workforce and behavioural practices. This is a multi-strand knowledge gathering research that focuses on critical strategic issues in leadership and employee behaviour.
