Gender Diversity in the Workplace and Its Effects on Employees’ Performance

Abstract

Interaction among the people from diverse backgrounds would be at greater level to meet the requirements of globalization in the present scenario. No employee across globe want to live and work in an insular environment, instead that would like to be part of a worldwide economy, so that they can contribute more to the global framework. Due to this, organizations (profit & non-profit) have to become more diversified from all possible dimensions, especially diversity in workforce to remain competitive in the business world. In the process of remaining competitive, management should maximize and capitalize the diversity in workforce of their own. Hence, the managers of the present and future should know how to recognize the strategies involving in organizational changes and development which will accommodate a multicultural environment to retain and attract the employees to achieve the common goal of any organization, i.e. profit maximization through better employee performance on the macro level, diversity is competitive advantage for any organization.Present paper, based on empirical study aims to explore the effects of workforce diversity in terms of gender on performance of the employees’ in food processing industry employees in Kerala. The descriptive study surveyed 230 respondents through convenience sampling technique and has the sampling adequacy of 0.771 (KMO Test’s) and Bartlett’s sphericity test (p = 0.000). Data was analysed through ANOVA, Correlation and regression analysis. The findings of the study has disclosed that diversity in terms of gender includes a vital contribution to predict the performance of the employees’. Further, this study has well-tried that Gender Diversity and performance of the employee’s differ across gender, age group, and work experience. The study significantly contributes towards advancements for gender diversity and its effects on employees’ performance in an organization. Once the organization is certain regarding distinctiveness among the gender diversity of the workforce, they will succeed and reduce conflicts, focus on high utilization of human at work, make sure the person-organization fit, person-job fit and person-group fit which is able to improve the performance of the workers in a company. The outcome of such gender diversity is more productivity, high satisfaction and engaged employees.

Keywords: Diversity, Workforce, Gender Diversity, Employee Performance, Productivity, Culture