Achieving Inter-Gender Communication Effectiveness in Organizations

Abstract

At the beginning of the 21st century, we have before us a complex and contradictory picture of organisations from the viewpoint of gender equality. On the one hand we find that the gender divisions at workplace are diminishing while on the other hand, familiar issues still persist—inequalities, under-representation in the upper echelons and over-representation in the lower. Irrespective of the contradictions in the picture, the business reality today is that there are enormous economic pressures and increasingly large number of women in the workforce. Thus it is imperative that men and women work together for achieving organisational goals and one of the critical requirements for which is effective inter-gender communication. Against this backdrop, the paper presents a model to understand the manifestation of gender stereotypes on inter-gender communication in organizations and discusses the impact of these manifestations for organizational effectiveness. The model is based on the findings of three inter-related empirical studies conducted by the author.