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One of the biggest challenge facing organisation: How to managediversity in work placeSince the World Trading Organisation has been set up in 1994, the business co-operations and interaction between companies coming from different countries have been more frequent. More and more organisations transcend national boundaries which can be reflected on the growth of multinational corporation and increasing plura lization of employees’ nationality. This can eventually promote intra-national diversity, and bring uncertainties and challenges to managers.Specifically, one of the biggest managerial challenges faced by managers is how to manage diversity in working places. Voelperl, Leibold and Tekie (2006) hold, some fundamental changes on organisational management, thinking and practices are indispensable to meet the challenge. As employees with different cultural backgrounds have different expectations and needs on their jobs, which often shows up on their work behaviors and attitudes, they only perform what they deem appropriate based on their own perceptions. Those perceptions originate from cultural environment and grow up for a long time, thus managers are not able to easily shoot down employees’ jobs or force them changing only accorded to managers’ own perceives. Thus how to manage staffs efficiently with sufficient respect on their cultures should be a question for managers, and traditional human resources management is inadequate. In addition, in order to fulfill employees’ need s and expectations, companies or managers need to communicate, motivate, guide and control them with full consideration of their own cultural characteristics. This complicates organisational management activities. Except for more management activities, a longer decision making process is also inevitable. Organisations spend more time on letting everyone to reach an agreement, as misunderstanding and mistakes are more likely occurred while communicating. This might be especially remarkable when the cultural diversity exist among management layer. The influence on both management activities and decision making process require managers to make changes on their management modes and start manage diversity in organisations.If companies or managers do not implement any management on diversity, it usually results in cross-cultural conflict (Church, 1995, p. 3). Cartwright and Cooper said, as cited in Mayer and Louw (2012), the conflict is often related to issues of identity and value. This is because, when an individual perceives differences about their hobbies, demand, faith and values between the self and others, conflict often occurs. (De Dreu et al., 1999).In order to efficiently and effectively manage the diversity, and finally avoid cross-cultural conflict, a better understanding of identity and social identity theory is necessary. Identity is defined as the notion of self. Basically, the diversity in organisations results in conflicts in identity. However, the “social identity theory is a social psychological analysis of the role of self-conception in group membership, group processes, and intergroup relations.” (Hogg, 2006). Comparing to the identity, the social identity theory emphasizes the group cognitively, thus people’s co nceptions as group members. In this group, no matter where they come from and what kind of cultural backgroundsthey have, people identify and evaluate themselves in the same way and share same definition of who they are, what attributes they have, and how they relate to. One means to achieve social identity is Social categorization. It categorises people within the group as a prototype and relate them to another by assigning them prototypical attributes (attitudes, feelings and behaviors) to build similarities within the group (Hogg, 2006), perceptually, people are depersonalised. Under the process of depersonalization, there are changes in identity and people start viewing themselves as the category representative rather than a unique individual.By applying social identity theory and basing on the Mayer and Louw’s research (2011), the following practical measures can be used for current organisations to reduce cross-cultural conflicts. First of all, organisations ought to set up a unified and positive organisation value. Under this value framework, employees are depersonalised so that they can share same thoughts, ideas, attitudes and value guide, and eventually achieve the success of the organisations together. The framework should be prepared by well-trained managers with adequate diversity management knowledge and refer to the emic perspectives of managers from different cultural groups.Secondly, cross-cultural and diversity training towards employees is also essential. The training should include improvement of knowledge and awareness of culture-specific identity concepts. Though enhancing people’s understanding towards cultures other than their owns, they tend to aware of similarities between their cultures and those from other part of the world, and are less likely to distinguish them by cultural superiority from other people in the work place. The Cultural sensitivities is especially important while training, as people are more prone to have conflicts with whom talk about taboo topics. Moreover some conflict management model, like cross-cultural mediation, can be useful to promote the cross-cultural understanding across culture and employees to some extent.Thirdly, managerial coach regarding to specific identity is necessary. It helps with some difficulties on people’s self-depersonalisation and can provide creative space for diversity management.ReferencesBass, B.M., 1997. Does the transactional-transformational leadership paradigm transcend organisational and national boundaries. , American Psychologist, 52(2), pp. 130-9.Church, A., 1995. Diversity in work-group setting: a case study. Leadership & Organizational Development Journal, 16(6), pp. 3-9.Hogg, M. A., 2006. Social identity theory. In: P. J. Burke, ed. Contemporary social psychological theories. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 111-136.Mayer, C.-H., and Louw, L., 2012. Managing cross-cultural conflict in organisations. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, 12(1), pp.3-8.Mayer, C.-H., and Louw, L., 2011. Managerial challenges in South Africa. European Business Review, 23(6), pp. 572-591.Voelpel, S.C., Leibold, M. and Tekie, E.B., 2006. Managing purposeful organizational misfit: exploring the nature of industry and organizational misfit to enable strategic change. Journal of Change Management, 6(3), pp. 257-276.。