What Is Gender Stereotyping In The Workplace

The organization our group decided to pick for the consulting project plan is Northtown. This company is a widely recognized automotive dealer in Western New York. Northtown started out as a single Toyota dealership and has grown to include seventeen separate franchises including Toyota, Mazda, Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, Ram, Lexus, Subaru, Hyundai, Land Rover Range Rover, Volkswagen, Kia, Scion, Volvo, Porsche, and FIAT. Although Northtown has a good reputation for building honest relationships, providing excellent customer service, and a great overall vehicle experience, an organization with so many facilities, and so many departments within each facility, there is room for many issues to arise in the workplace. Our group figured that Northtown
would be a good organization to choose since there are many problems that we would be able to pick and analyze, as well as give bona fide examples for our consulting plan project. One of the major internal issues we will be focusing on is one that any heavily service based organization will face. Emotional labor is the effort an employee must exert in order to do his or her job and it can be extremely strenuous. While all organizations deal with emotional labor to a degree, retail jobs are some of the most emotionally strenuous out. An employee’s commission and even job security depends on providing up-beat customer service so the stress to perform forces them to act against their true emotions. Being an auto dealer, the employees at Northtown certainly confront different customers with different emotional needs every day and must alter how they present themselves accordingly. Emotional labor is an important issue to be tackled in the workplace because it can cause serious mental problems for certain employees in the long term. This reduces the effectiveness of said employees in doing their job and will likely harm their private lives. Beyond the organization itself, customers should also be concerned about this issue because if an employee is fed up with their emotional labor, they may refuse to provide any at all; therefore, diminishing the customer experiences. Stereotyping is another internal issue in the workplace.
This can be defined as believing unfairly that all people or things with a particular characteristic are the same. Two particular problems come to mind when this problem is mentioned: gender stereotyping and age stereotyping. When a new employee is hired, or even with experienced employees, gender stereotyping is a prevalent problem. If employees see a female being hired, versus a male being hired, on average they figure that the male knows more about cars; therefore believe that males could be a larger asset to the company. However, this is wrong, as there are many females working for Northtown, who have more experience and knowledge in the career than many of the men combined, going against the gender stereotype.
Age Stereotyping is also noticed in the workplace. Many times it is noticeable that customers will approach younger car salesmen versus older salesmen. This may be because of the thought that a younger, less experienced salesman will be able to get a lower price when compared to the older, more experienced salesman who better understands the system. This stereotype is also wrong, as there is no difference with the age of the car salesman, although many customers perceive
it. Emotional labor and stereotyping are just a few of the Internal Issues that come to mind when thinking of Northtown. While many other problems come to mind, these were the two that were felt to be the most urgent in regards to being addressed, as well as the two that had the largest impact on current employees. There are definite answers to address both of these problems, in which could clear Northtown of both emotional labor and stereotyping problems.