Business Culture -- Gender Differences Identifying Gender

Business Culture -- Gender Differences

Identifying Gender Communication Styles: Bridging the Gap between the Male-Female Diversity for Increasing Performance in the Workplace Setting

One of the best and most essential assets that a business organization has is its workforce, composed of members/employees that use their knowledge and skills about a specific task in order to perform well for the production of goods and services of the organization. Human resources are crucial elements in improving the efficiency of an organization because they are the first people to experience and determine the organization's strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, ascertaining the nature of each member's personality is vital to better communication and interaction within the organization, leading to higher productivity and efficiency in his or her work performance.

Because of the importance of human resources in organizational management, this paper discusses an issue that is of vital importance in the politics of workplace environment and interaction. This issue is the male-female dichotomy in communicating, interacting, and performing within the workplace setting. This issue is discussed and analyzed in the journal article entitled, Do women and men communicate differently at work? By Catherine Ng (1998). This article centers on the issue of communication styles among men and women as their way of asserting their power in the workplace. Ng's study involves a survey conducted among male and female professionals in Hongkong (since the study takes place within the Eastern setting using a Western research framework), and these questionnaires are designed to contain hypothetical "work situations" that significantly illustrate the respondents' attitudes and perceptions regarding their use of communication as a way to interact and show power to their co-workers and members of their organization.

A series of hypotheses were formulated that determines how male and female respondents communicate with their colleagues at work. Ng used the following determinants to reflect communication styles of males and females: same-sex communication (male-male and female-female), mixed-sex communication (male-to-female and female-to-male), topic of discussion (personal and business), and communication according to the status of the other party (co-worker, subordinate, or outsider). These determinants were used to ensure that they reflect the personal styles of employees when communicating and interacting, leading to a more "constructive feedback" about the dynamics of gendered communication in the workplace.