Nicolás García Trujillo – Organizational Behavior

Stereotypes, are they really what they say?

What if my company only had one certain type of people? Would they all be Asian? Would
they all have green eyes? Would all of them be engineers? Would all of them be Asian
engineers with green eyes? Would they all have to think the same way and have the same
ideas?
Well, if my company only were to be managed by certain type of people it wouldn’t be a
company at all, if they are were thinking the same way and having the same ideas, I would
only hire one person right?, well the thing is that a company must have different types of
people, different type of backgrounds in order to be able to have different points of view to
a problem and by that achieving greater goals.
Knowing that diversity is important is not the problem, the problem comes when diversity
gets in the way of someone thoughts, specifically stereotypes or biases some has about
people from different backgrounds or cultures. It is understandable that everyone has an
opinion about different topics and different people, but their opinion is not always the truth.
Lets say, for example, a stereotype about Colombians (Colombia, the Latin-American
country, not Columbia the U.S.A city) and it is that Colombians “sell drugs”, is that a
100% truthful statement? Well, the answer is “NO”, there might be Colombians who do
that, but that does not necessarily mean every single Colombian does it. An interesting way
to try to overcome these types of stereotypes, is to get to know Colombians a little bit
better, get to know their culture, their roots, their background, etc…. and once you’ve done
that, you could make a statement determining whether the 100% of Colombians sell drugs
or not. That is just one example, and it does not just happen to Colombians, it happens to
people all around the world, stereotypes are a reality, but in order to overcome them people
have to stop believing everything they are told and instead start getting to investigate a little
more about other people’s cultures and roots.
So, that being said, information, and by information I mean, real and accurate information
is important in order to overcome any type of bias or stereotype, with the right information
we could avoid making people feel bad or sick by not saying the wrong things about their
culture and their relatives.
In my experience, working with people who have different backgrounds was an amazing
experience, that is because I could learn something new about life, a different point of view.
For example, there is this class where I am working with a girl from France, she has a
completely different point of view to life as I see it, and listening and learning what she has
to say has given me a new perspective of life as I used to see it, also she has taught me
some French. At the beginning when I first met her, I had this stereotype of French people
“smelling bad” but as time went by and I got to know her better and gather information
about her and her culture, I realized that it was just another fake “stereotype”, she didn’t
smell bad.