The Effects of Cross Cultural Work Force Diversity on Employee Performance in Egyptian Pharmaceutical Organizations

Abstract

In today’s increasingly rapid changing business environment, countries such as Egypt have changed drastically to accommodate the increasingly diverse work force in most, if not all, of its organizations. The diversity of the work force in Egypt is quite admirable and has been taking an ever increasing trend in the past couple of decades. Nowadays, it is very common to find business professionals whom are simultaneously fluent in several languages, such as English, French, German, and of course Arabic while coming from a highly diverse training and education backgrounds. This study explores the impact of gender, age, and education background on employee performance in the Egyptian Pharmaceutical industry which is renowned to employ highly diversified workforce. The study sample was 300 middle level management positions. Data was collected via self-administered questionnaires methodology. The results indicated that only two variables, gender and education background, were significant in explaining the variance in employee performance when different work force work together, while surprisingly, age diversity does not.