Bamboo ceiling: Is your workplace free of cultural bias?
“The Australian Race Discrimination Commissioner Dr. Tim Soutphommasane recently commented that a ‘bamboo ceiling’ is keeping Asian workers from acquiring leadership positions in Australia.”
After reading above mentioned article, I started wondering about the origin of this “Bamboo Ceiling” and found that Human Resource is, in fact, the source of this so-called ‘bamboo ceiling.’
Human Resource, which is a significant cost to each and every SME and large companies. To control this cost more businesses, and HR managers are adapting to self-hiring, Internet (www.Linkedin.com) and or other hybrid solutions using e-recruiting websites, internal communications, specialized industry communications and associations, social and online media. However, HRM has several advantages such as its tactical manners can manage acquiescence with federal and state laws, streamline methods for recruitment and selection, and produce analyses, data and reports for higher management use. Furthermore, HR is very demanding and challenging field. HR may offer increase business effectiveness, exactitude of the information and the expertise to perform HR audits
However, HR has problems such as can be a complicated for small institutions in which some managers and or employers must wear many hats where budget is not big enough to have a dedicated human resources department. As part of this assignment, a number of journal articles and chapters were reviewed on HRM and recruitment process. In order to approve or disapprove the statement, “Discrimination is a convincing episode throughout the recruitment process.” The human resource systems and the culminations reporting to personality, insights and preferences of managers were dissected, and individual views were considered.
Humans are a material equaling. Consequently, people relate to one another, operate together, and bestow ideas, all of this is at the very core of the ability for a company to be innovative, conscious, adaptive, and successful. The relational aspect of managing and organizing people could be the most-difficult part of one’s working-life as an administrator. One may agree that most of the predicaments a person will experience at work will be related to people, the things they do, or do not do, and one may relate to and with them. Some experts agree that ‘one size fits all’ management approach will not work because people are complicated and may need different approach with different individuals. Therefore, Human Resource Management (HRM) comes in existence.
According to Clegg, Kornberger and Pitts, HRM concerns a broad range of practices and processes that include:
Attracting and selecting employees in the line with strategic direction and intent of the organization
Managing and facilitating career development and advancement of an employee.
Dealing with and keeping abreast of current rules, laws, and legislation in industrial relations and other policy areas such as occupational health and safety legislation, equity and diversity, and anti-discrimination laws.
Ensuring there are uniform procedures and company HR policy information available to staff and management on all aspect of employment.
Small to medium sized organizations where, most people work for their living do not have human resource department, and it is usually the case that owner, manager, or supervisor, with the full range of duties and or responsibilities, are in charge of the Human Resource. These small organizations also face hurdles of small estimates for human resource department. However, to be proficient to pick and clutch talented staff, most-large organizations with sufficient funds to manage their HRM needs, face the same HR challenges as those that face small businesses.
Irrespective of business size, how HR managers and or business partners propose their tasks is a capacity of their own and their organization’s value systems. Therefore, statement such as
“bamboo ceiling is keeping Asian workers from acquiring leadership positions in Australia.”
Is integral to HR function and also is in connection to the human resource manners and the culminations reciting to personality, perceptions and values of directors. To explore such issues we need to consider the history of HR management and its origin and foundation viewpoints that drive different approach in HRM.
There are varying degree of accounts of the theory and practices of Human Resource Management (HRM). For hundreds of years, anthropologists have been studying and or investigating work practices in ancient times. It has been noticed that many Chinese, as well as Indians, were entitled after what they did for a living. Swordsman, boatman, Fisherman, Tradesman and are not simply surname but also job titles: people were, quite precisely, what they did for a living. These antiquated people often did the same job for life as some experts agree that sometimes these people were born into a trade and some they followed in their father’s footsteps. Young people would enter apprenticeship for jobs that required lifetime of learning in order to receive close mentoring.
Experts agree that an apprenticeship have changed very little over the centuries and model used to train people remained active. Today the apprenticeship system of staff training and development remains and HRM grows up. While anything to do with finding and hiring a person for a job can be established as HRM, the theory and study of HRM are entirely new. They began with an introduction of HRM as an area of study as part of the Harvard University MBA and at the Michigan Business School in the 1980s.
According to Clegg and et al., HRM is underpinned by variations of scientific management or human relations approaches especially in regards to staff training, development, and on performance measurement and rewards.
‘Humans’ as ‘resources’ are central to HRM because it concerns the very name of the Human Resource Management. The core HRM functions have, without a doubt, the potential to influence significantly the performance and outcomes of organizations (Becker and Garter, 1996). As part of this writing, I have scrutinized an amount of journal articles and chapters on HRM and recruitment process.
According to Clegg and et al., demographic changes associated with migration and generational changes have critical implications for the ability of employers to attract talented, qualified staff to their organization. Furthermore, as with the selection stage, one should pay particular attention to relevant equity and diversity acts, laws, and legislation when recruiting.
Recruitment includes exploring for and receiving possible job candidates in adequate numbers and quality so that the organization can select the most-appropriate people to fill its job needs (Shen and Edwards, 2004: 816)
One may agree that HR managers and departments have a variety of attempted and commissioned recruitment tactics at their disposal. However, in actuality selection and recruitment are not undividedly discrete functions. As Clegg and el al describes, that both require the high level of synthesis between:
(a) The nature of the jobs being filled;
(b) The skills, qualifications, capabilities, and attributes required of a prospective employee(s);
© The skills, qualifications, capabilities and attributes of the people available in the job market.
It is HR managers’ responsibility to ensure that a clear job-duty statement has been written. However, it is not perpetually the case as limited consideration has been paid to factor that influence employers in their recruitment behavior, especially as it affects immigrants.
Almeida et al., suggest that organizations are not necessarily induced by human capital lens throughout the recruitment process. Preferably they seem to be stimulated by the place and specificity of the process. According to Almeida et al., the key factors which can either favorably or unfavorably affect companies include the organizational size, model, resource availability, and ethnic heterogeneity of clients and or customers, level of role criticalness, industry-based ethos and control style. Some of these factors such as ‘Tick box evaluation system,’ ‘prefer Australian background,’ ‘just like me’ effect could contribute to the applicant and or employee being distinguished upon with during the selection process.
However, finding of Almeida et al., study suggest that the factors impacting the employment opportunities available to immigrant professionals are complex, and may be contradictory.
In addition to preceding statement, research “Selection and appraisal: reconstituting social relations” conducted by Townley suggest, that a selection, by definition, entails a process of discrimination, and the opportunity for control to emphasize employee ‘acceptability’, or the ‘good block symptoms,’ rather than ‘suitability’ continuing in task-based criteria, has been well covered in the discussion of recruitment and election judgments (Silverman and Jones 1973; Blackburn and Mann 1979; Oliver and Turton 1982; Jenkins 1986; Jewson and Mason 1986).
While ‘Does Racial and Ethical Discrimination Very Across Minority Groups:
Evidence from a number of displeased Investigations, one of the greatest audit discrimination inquiries ever conducted by Research School of Economics at Australian National University, Canberra ACT have the benefit of rendering impartial estimates of the degree of discrimination in the hiring process, they can only observe the first stage of the employment process.
In theory, the level of discrimination in the pre-interview plane could be negatively or decidedly correlated with discrimination in hiring arrangements and wage proposals. As Heckman (1998, 102) notes, “A well-designed audit investigation could reveal many individual firms that discriminate, while at the same time the negligible effect of discrimination on the salaries of contracted workers could be zilch.
Study conducted by Research School of Economics at Australian National University, Canberra ACT provides an intuitive metrics for the level of discrimination in terms of the number of extra applications that a minority candidate (Asian applicant) must submit to get the same number of callbacks as an Anglo applicant. However, when this study formally test whether racial discrimination differs by gender, it can not repudiate the hypothesis that the level of discrimination is the alike for men and women of the very ethnic group.
According to Ackroyd, S., Crowdy, P. A. ‘Can Culture be managed?’ when human resource managers conceive of their jobs as that of managing culture, arguably, they too are caught in a similar culture trap. The trap is that unless an until workplace cultures are more adequately understood, HRM will merely foster the illusion of managerial control.
If power in labor organizations is through ‘technical rules’ it is hardly a problem should the worker possess a distinct cultural identity. Once control is through the workers ‘normative orientation,’ the necessary power in the work will depend on the removal of any fundamental cultural differences between him and his superiors. (Wickham 1976: 9–10)
According to Jackson et al., the view of the individual most commonly held within the discussions of organisational behavior and management theory is almost unique to those discourses.
References
Clegg, S., Kornberger, M., Pitsis, T. 2011, Managing & Organizations, 3rd edition, SAGE Publication Ltd, London.
Almeida, S., Fernando, M., Sheridan, A. May 2012, ‘Revealing the screening: organisational factors influencing the recruitment of immigrant professionals,’ The International Journal of Human Resource Management, Vol. 23, No 9, 1950–1965
Townley, B. 1989, ‘Selection and appraisal: reconstituting ‘social relations’?, in J. Storey (ed.) New perspective on human resource management, Routledge, London, pp. 92–108
Leigh, A. & Australian National University May 2010, ‘Does Racial and Ethnic Discrimination Vary Across Minority Groups? Evidence from a Field Experiment’ IZA Discussion Paper №4947, Canberra ACT, pp. 1–12
AMERICAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION May 1975, ‘THE HUMAN CAPITAL APPROACH,’ Vol. 65 NO. 2, USA, pp. 69–72
Ho, C., Alcorso, C. 2004, ‘Migration and employment Challenging the success story’ Journal of Sociology, The Australian Sociological Association, Vol. 40(3): pp. 237–259
Ackroyd, S., Crowdy, P. A. ‘Can Culture be Managed? Working with “Raw” Material: The Case of the English Slaughtermen’ Personal Review 19,5
O’Doherty, D. 2007, ‘Individual Differences, Personality and Self’ Introducing Organisational behavior and management, Thomson, pp. 74–89
Jackson, N., Carter, P. 2007, ‘Rethinking Organisational behavior: a poststructuralist framework’ Published Harlow, Esses, England, pp. 143–167
Noon, M., Blyton, P. 1997, ‘The Realities of Work’ Basingstoke: Macmillan Business, Chapter 1, pp. 1–12
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