Democracy and cultural diversity - How the power of cultural diversity creates a better workplace in Europe?

Sammanfattning: Globalization has developed workplaces that contain a mixture of people with different cultural backgrounds. Managing a culturally diverse workplace can be challenging and strategies for managing require constant improvements and adaptations in order to have a successful work environment. The purpose of this thesis is to highlight and gain a deeper understanding of how the power of cultural diversity creates a better workplace in Europe. To reach this purpose I have investigated the benefits and the problems of a culturally diverse workplace as well as the best strategies and improvements for managing a culturally diverse workplace. The thesis has a qualitative approach and empirical data collected are based on interviews with experts from the leadership positions of two culturally diverse workplaces in Europe: Open Skåne presenting the private sector and the Faculty of Humanities and Theology at Lund University presenting the public sector. Participants in both cases were diverse in age, gender and cultural background. The study also indicates that workplaces can lack good strategies for communication and participation among the employees, which highlights the need for organizations to set strategies in order to develop an inclusive workplace based on mutual, cultural understanding. Nonetheless, the main result of the study showed that the power of cultural diversity creates a better workplace and clearly cancel out the problems. The final findings from this study is the importance of organizing workshops and trainings to actively promote and then ripe the benefits of a culturally diverse workplace. More specifically, these activities have shown to contribute to decrease prejudices and more in general discrimination in the workplace, thus creating an inclusive environment with tolerance, acceptance and recognition among the employees. An example of the best practice in this area is to increase employees’ knowledge and awareness about cultural diversity, to share experiences and ideas among the employees and create an even better workplace.