Workplace discrimination: causes, impacts, and legal frameworks

Professionalism in the Workplace

Prejudice is a favorable or unfavorable judgment or opinion toward a person or group based on one's perception of an individual, group, or situation. Prejudice and discrimination in the working environment are severe offenses that could contribute in serious penalties. Prejudice in the workplace usually arises because the working environment is made of people from varying social, cultural, and racial backgrounds. These individuals tend not have much in common except the fact that they simply work together. While prejudice sometimes emerges as intentional unfavorable judgment, it can sometimes emerge as comments or behaviors that are said or conducted innocently but are misunderstood.

Sample Prejudice Scenario

An example of a scenario in which an employee may feel as though he has been treated with prejudice involves a gay worker who is regularly talked about at work as if he is not present ("Resolving Human Rights Issues in the Workplace," n.d.). The employee's work is quite demanding and usually requires him to work with his colleagues though they tend to isolate him most of the time. For example, when the birthdays of everyone are being celebrated, he is not invited and his birthday is the only one not celebrated. While carrying out his responsibilities, his workmates don't respond to his requests for contributions in a timely manner as they joke about leaving him hanging. As a result, he has become increasingly frustrated to an extent that his mental health is deteriorating. Even though he had stable mental health for many years before joining this work group, his symptoms have started flaring up in the past few months.

The actions of this work group towards the gay employee amount to prejudice because of his gender. These actions amount to prejudice because they are mobbing, which is the constant, systematic bullying of a person by his/her workmates. Mobbing is a practice that occurs in the workplace through peer pressure and usually involves several co-workers to an extent that is equated to bullying among children in schools. Mobbing is a more prevalent practice in the working environment than other destructive behaviors like racial discrimination and sexual harassment. Employees are vulnerable to mobbing in an environment with people from different backgrounds, beliefs, and cultures. It is conducted because workers may not share similar beliefs, gender, level of competence, and sexual orientation. In the situation of the gay employee, mobbing was carried out because his colleagues or workmates did not share the same sexual orientation.

Mobbing is a form of discrimination in the workplace, which is a come a long way in the past few decades. Discrimination in the working environment is mostly carried out in the form of prejudice, which comes in qualitatively various kinds that have to be managed differently (Morris & Fiske, 2009). Many kinds of prejudice conducted in the workplace by most groups do not fit the conventional image. One of the major challenges in addressing discrimination in the work environment is that it is largely unintentional and invisible and takes place in daily activities like performance appraisals, job assignments, and informal mentoring.