Introduction
Taylor Cox defined managing diversity as “planning and implementing organizational systems and practices to manage people so that the potential advantages of diversity are maximized while its potential disadvantages are minimized” (Cox, 1993, p. 11).
The modern international firms have changed the approach to human resource management and the way in which the current employees management occurs. The increase in multinational firms also creates a diverse workforce in terms of ethnicity, race, age, gender, religion, and sexual orientations, among others.
The idea of diversity in management in organisations originates in North America in the 1980s. Since then, researchers have developed dynamic work structures globally. It has also grown and gained popularity in the field of human resource management due to dynamic social and economic circumstances.
It has now become a part of any successful organisation in managing its workforce due to increasing competitiveness and realignment strategies organisations use to improve, and sustain their businesses performances and ever dynamic expectations of employees and society. These factors make organisations review issues which they have traditionally ignored in their practices.
The current management challenge is that employees are no longer of the same race or gender, but rather a great combination of almost all races presents the modern structure of the labour market (Mathis and Jackson, 2011).
Factors facilitating Diversity Management
Corporations that tend to have workforces of diverse ethnicities, ages, and gender proportions must consider the methods of reconciling these diverse compositions of their workforces with minimal interruptions of their daily operations.
Thus, management of workforce diversity is an essential part of protecting organisational performance and possible legal tangles from the employees that feel dissatisfied due to issues of harassment and discrimination regarding their diverse characteristics in the organisation.
In the 21st century, the composition of the labour market becomes more diverse with regard to sexual orientations, gender, race, ethnicity, and religion beliefs, among others. The demand for human labour is always on the rise globally due to an increasing number of global corporations.
Though many women occupy managerial positions today, any single gender or race cannot meet labour force requirements. Thus, in a multinational organisation, workforce is likely to consist of people of different races and genders (Fernandez, 1991).
Labour patterns’ demands are also influenced by the aging processes of the population. Changes in demographic structures must present both opportunities and challenges to employers. Organisations will experience skills shortage, reduced incomes for old persons, increased life and health expectancies, and continued economic growth.
Changes in demographic factors must also affect the labour market. This means that the traditional approach to workforce management may not be successful. Thus, employers have made changes in terms of recruitment, retention, rewards, and motivation, among the other factors.
Likewise, they must address areas of organisational turnover rates and cultural change so as to include every employee. This implies that a traditional and fixed approach to managing today’s workforce may not succeed.
Studies have identified the increased international movement of people which is also a factor that has resulted in workforce diversity and skills shortage in organisation. These movements have led to shortages of qualified workforce in other places. In the 1990s, the idea of equal opportunities’ policies took a central role in the developed nations of the world.
This aimed at meeting the increasing changes in the competitive market environment for an organisation to survive. Critics also observed that uniformity in the workforce was on the decline. Thus, organisations had to develop management policies to cater for the diverse changes in the human resources.
This was a move to retain experienced and skilled workers from different backgrounds so as to protect the company’s competitiveness in the labour market.
Equal opportunity and diversity
Regarding the current changing workforce compositions, the company has adopted the concept of equal opportunity in order manage its diverse workforce. Organisations focus on the business areas, such as compensation, hiring, transfers, promotions, and terminations, with regard to its human resource management.
For instance, in IBM, recreational or sponsored activities occur without any form of discrimination based on “race, colour, genetics, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age or status as a special disabled veteran or other veteran covered by the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Act of 1974, as amended” (IBM, n.d., par. 1).
Organisations have ensured that these activities, their organisational structure and administration with regard to employees’ benefit plans are in line with the provision of local, state, and federal requirements.
Organisations also insist on valuing and respecting difference among its workforce and business partners. In this context, most firms expect managers to ensure that their work environments have no any form harassment or discrimination.
Organisations have introduced affirmative action and equal opportunity for all current and potential employees. The firms do this through conducting special programmes solely for minorities, women, people with disabilities, mainly, war veterans.
The HR policies ensure equal chances for career growth and compensations. Firms consider effective management of their workforce using diversity policies as strategic business objectives. This is what most companies expect every senior executive to promote.
Importance of diversity
Morrison identified that diversity in an organisation enhanced market share as well as customer relations, mainly in minority-culture masses (1992). This explains why customers prefer to make purchases on their own or from firms that have different workforce. This idea also reflects the fact that firms, which have diverse workforces, are sensitive to different needs of customers.
Consequently, they handle customers’ complaints in a sensitive manner, thus resulting in satisfaction of the clients. This causes the customer retention as Bhadury notes. Thus, IBM is a good example in management of diversity in a global organisation (Bhadury, Mighty and Damar, 2000).
Thomas found out that effective management of diversity at IBM resulted in increased revenues. The company managed to achieve this through partnering with vendors and resellers from the diverse backgrounds (Thomas, 2004).
Diversity management in the workforce also enhances organisational performance and quality in terms of improving creativity, skills, flexibility, conflict management and problem-solving skills. Scholars have tried to understand how managing diversity in organisation results in improved performance, teamwork, conflict resolution, and problem-solving skills.
However, their findings suggest mixed outcomes because of different environment and circumstances of the study. Morrison suggested that diversity management was responsible for increased job satisfaction, performance, commitment of employees, and productivity level.
On the other hand, Fernandez observed that diversity management resulted in adaptable workforces in a changing demographic environment. This is responsible for the provision of competitive edge in the labour market (Fernandez, 1991).
Diversity management also changed the sphere of trade unions movements and anti-discrimination policies as several authors indicated in Britain. Studies by McEnrue established that organisations, which had effective diversity management policies, had decreased cases of both individual and organisational level conflicts (McEnrue, 1993).
This is because managers acquired the necessary skills of managing workforces of diverse backgrounds. Further studies indicated that teams with diverse management performed better than those of uniform compositions. Diverse members have diverse skills in various areas, such as decision-making and conflict resolution, which any organisation needs for a successful performance.
Cox supported this idea in his additional works based on studies on individual innovation and creativity, which analyze problem-solving skills due to different perspectives each team member acquired (Cox, 1993).
The concept of diversity in management made other scholars look at its effects in terms of different cultures using the basis interactions processes. A number of researchers have based their works on cultural diversity in relation to national and ethnic differences among diverse workforces in organisations. These studies show that in-group differences resulted in negative consequences on performance of new groups.
Thus, performances improve better in culturally diverse groups than in homogenous cultural groups. Culturally diverse groups rely on abilities, and skills of different team members in handling issues. This observation indicates that organisations should have teams that consist of workforces from different backgrounds.
If an organisation wants to realise the benefits of managing diversity, such organisations must put in place sufficient solutions to challenges facing the organisation. Organisation must take into consideration factors, such as different cultural patterns, external relations, objectives and strategies of the firm, to ultimately realize positive impacts of diversity management at the workplace.
However, the challenge is that most organisations fail to carry out a thorough analysis of the above factors as most studies tend to concentrate on individual, inter-personal and group factors. Furthermore, there are scarce studies based on studying different aspects and impacts of diversity on organisations.
Workforce Diversity
There has been a major shift in ethnic and race workforce in the US. These changes have affected multinational corporations around the globe. The US Census Bureau stated that by the year 2050, minority groups in the US would be over 50 percent of the total population.
The growth will mainly affect Hispanic population at about 39 percent. This Hispanic minority will exceed the African Americans, and Asian population will raise to approximately 9 percent by 2050, which means a triple growth.
The above figures show that HR management must prepare to handle ethnic and racial differences that become commonplace in a workplace environment, in order to meet the organisational efforts in achieving business targets. For instance, organisations have to deal with the issue of racial tensions between workers of different ethnic groups.
The companies introduced policies that provided for equal opportunities in participation in all social corporate-sponsored events. HR programmes must ensure training in multiracial workforce so as to reduce negative aspects of ethnic and racial differences.
Training in diversity and other programmes should ensure that different workers of different races and ethnicity interact openly and frequently and work effectively in enhancing company’s growth. These are the positive consequences of having different racial and ethnic employees.
It also shows why an organisation must strive to ensure that its workforce is a team which has a set target to achieve. Interaction of different employees helps most firms in conflict resolution. This is how companies are managing their diverse work groups consisting of Europeans, Asians, and African Americans, and Hispanics, among other minority groups.
The issue of immigrant workers must be also managed in most workplaces. Developed nations have experienced influxes in the number of illegal immigrants seeking for employment opportunities. At the same time, there are also cases of illegal immigrants who organisations must take into account when formulating workforce diversity policies.
Issues dealing with illegal immigrants have resulted in political, employment-related, and social debates. This is mainly because some multinationals exploit cheap labour of illegal immigrants instead of hiring the country’s jobless populations.
Industry observers believe that the number of illegal immigrants of diverse ethnic and racial origins will increase. This will lead to changes in immigrants’ laws. Consequently, the HR departments must also observe the changing trends and adjust their policies to agree with those of the company and industry.
Studies have attempted to show the expectations of workforce including the generation and age groups’ differences. These are the diversities which employers must manage for their survival as they present both challenges and opportunities under the current prevailing social, economic, technological, and globalisation in the workplaces. These changes include mature, baby boomers, generation x, and generation y.
Changes in the economy and industries and the aging workforce have presented issues of concern to employers. Hard economic times have seen aged work group delaying their retirements, taking part-time jobs, or phasing retirement. They exceed the normal retirement age of 65.13 years in the US.
The baby boomers are approaching retirement age, and many of them will leave knowledge and experience gaps in their organisations after their leaving. The generational differences among the workforce are likely to present challenges and conflicts in organisations (Mathis and Jackson, 2011).
For instance, in most organisations, most baby boomers have matured with the firms and have a lot of experience, thus their main concerns are job security. On the other hand, generation Y expects early rewards, asks questions and always protests against why seniors act the way they do and make certain decisions. They also prefer using technology.
Such conflicts are likely to result in cases of management where one generation with diverse characteristics is under control of another generation. HR policies must harmonise these differences and ensure that the organisation works well.
Mature workers offer the advantages of experiences which can only be gained through the work, whereas the new generations are normally technological savvy and provide useful IT knowledge to the organisation.
HR manager and other managers should identify any possible opportunities and challenges that may occur due to the differences in the workforce because of multigenerational aspects in an organisation. Firms embark on activities for promoting effectiveness management and multigenerational engagement in the workforce.
For instance, many organisations have established their management of multigenerational through training and putting individuals of different generations to work in teams. Thus, teamwork and training are effective ways of reducing multigenerational tensions in an organisation.
The number of working women is increasing in most multinational organisations. In the US, women workforce accounts for 46 percent of the total workforce. However, men still work more hours than their female counterparts. Economic changes in the labour market have created many opportunities for the female workers in the areas, which have been traditionally male dominated.
However, the areas like agriculture, manufacturing, and industries are still under control of men. These are the spheres, which suffer severe economic challenges. On the other hand, women have dominated areas which are health care, accommodation and education, among others (Mathis and Jackson, 2011).
There are gender-related issues that happen across all organisations. Most organisations have underpaid women because of their work hours and nature of their duties. Women have also occupied less number of senior management positions in most organisations than men do.
However, the trend has changed significantly in the last decade as many females have obtained management positions. Differences in payment could be due to family responsibilities women have. Studies show that female workers would take pay cuts so as to spend more time with their families.
Still, both the genders have challenges of caring for old family members; baby boomers start encountering health issues, disabilities and other health related conditions. Thus, the HR policies must focus on addressing the issue of work and family life balance.
Managing diversity in an organisation
Works by Hayes indicated that organisations could succeed at achieving effective management in diversity if the top executives had commitment and fully supported the initiative.
Most successful outcomes of managing diversity usually have their roots from recruitment, hiring, placement, and retention of the best workforce in an organisation. This shows that firms, which have strategies of managing their workforce diversities, must create a working environment that enhances satisfaction, commitment, and motivation of different people (Hayes, 1999).
Any attempt at managing diversity at workplaces must establish clear objectives, effective communication channels and assessment criteria. These objectives should reflect the company’s aims and workforce compositions.
The organisation should identify both undesirable and desirable workforce issues that influence diversity. Meanwhile, the organisation should take into account its human resources and culture that exist in order to create effective diversity management policies and practices.
Organisations should focus on training and other policies programmes in order to handle cases of diversity. Management can also identify how different factors affect different workers of diverse background. This is particularly necessary where power relations could be the main cause of diversity conflicts.
Another crucial element in diversity management is the issue of intercultural communication. Training in intercultural communication can enhance effective communication among employees of different cultural background. Thus, an organisation can avoid miscommunication and conflicts that result from communication challenges.
Multigenerational workforce should have an appropriate mentoring policy that aims at assisting newly employed or different generation. Mentoring programme should focus on the organisational culture, and create conditions where employees can emulate the best practices in managing diversity and why diversity is necessary in today’s firms.
Managing workforce diversity should also focus on assessment of an individual’s beliefs about self, work values, opinions of others’ cultures, and leadership approaches from a multicultural perspective. The fundamental idea is to identify the role of ethnocentrism among the workforce and how an individual can manage it. This will result into reduced cases of conflicts in the organisation.
Effective management of diversity in a workplace also requires necessary support systems, and avoidance of discrimination. Instead, the management should focus on enhancing inclusion among different employees. Organisation can create both formal and informal settings where employees of different background can easily interact and build their networks. However, language barriers should not hinder such initiatives.
Bagshaw noted that most workers at all levels misunderstood the concept of diversity, and why training programmes were necessary in it. On this basis, organisation must first explain why such programmes are necessary and what the organisation aims at achieving using them. Thus, diversity presentation should be clear and show changing issues and why continuous management and training are necessary (Bagshaw, 2004).
Effective diversity management must cut across all management levels and subordinates. This aims at creating an open strategy where employees may show their experiences within the organisation. Issues of main concerns should be the basis on which diversity management focuses on, so as to bring a behaviour change necessary for managing diversity.
Conclusion
Organisational approach to managing diversity depends on how its senior executives understand its advantages and disadvantages. Workforce diversity has become mandatory for the survival of any organisation today.
Thus, top executives have to take the initiative and study the compositions of their workers and recommended appropriate changes to enhance a creation of functional diversity environment. Diversity results in opportunities for both the internal and external competitiveness.
Conflicts in organisations due to issues of diversity demonstrate that most organisations have no appropriate mechanism of managing workforce diversity. Thus, firms should look for the ways they can manage and exploit diversity in human resource.
An approach gives a firm diverse workforce which will determine the outcome of the process. This is also crucial for enhancing useful workforce diversity management practices. Multinational corporations must also consider different cultures, legislation, and orientations and align them in their global business strategies in order to demonstrate the uniqueness of employees and customers.
Reference List
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Fernandez, P 1991, Managing a diverse work force: regaining the competitive edge, Lexington Books, Lexington, MA.
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Mathis, L and Jackson, H 2011, Human Resource Management, 13th ed, South-Western Cengage Learning, Mason, OH.
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Morrison P 1992, The new leader: guidelines on leadership diversity in America, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA.
Thomas, D 2004, ‘Diversity as strategy’, Harvard Business Review, vol. 82, no. 9, pp. 98–108.