Outline
Workforce diversity should be treated as a business initiative and not a human resource or personnel department function. There is a strong business case for diversity in the workplace. The 21st century enterprises have a felt need to value, and leverage diversity. It is top agenda item for successful CEOs. It is commonly accepted business reality that heterogeneous groups outperform homogenous groups.
Heterogeneous groups are better at problem solving, effective at decision making, and they are particularly well equipped in generating creative ideas. The advantage comes from the fact that the diversity of the workforce background itself imparts a fertile launch pad for creativity to work at its best. Two brains are better than one is a truism aptly applicable to business situations.
The power of brainstorming to create a dramatic impact in finding creative solutions to business problems is enormous. Modern work teams can do wonders in workplace. Productivity, and work quality significantly go up when employees have, or perceive they have, a full opportunity to contribute in a meaningful way.
3M typifies such philosophy abundantly. There is a sense of job ownership, project ownership, ownership of the outcome. Even the most die-hard critic of workforce diversity will be unable to refute the obvious benefits of diversity.
Introduction
We live in a society that is known for its differences. Diversity in terms of multiculturalism, gender politics, affirmative action, preferences, and mandates have become part of our existence. We are today more actively dividing ourselves by race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, cultural norms, physical ability, and socioeconomic status, than in the past (George, 1961).
Though diversity is in existence since long, it is only recently that it has attracted greater attention from the corporate mandarins. Managing diversity is nothing but changing the organisational culture or its standard operating procedures. The fostered culture should enable employees to closely examine their values and beliefs and question themselves as to why others look different for them.
Diversity management must essentially create an environment that works naturally for the total diversity mixture. Keeping this in view the present paper attempts to clarify some of the real life business challenges in an environment characterised by diversity in workforce.
Why Diversity Management?
Human beings tend to see through their own views and interpret the views by what is accustomed to them. There is an addiction to seek the aggregation of those makes a lot of agnate to them for the acquisition and assurance in similarities. It is difficult for humans to conceive power, and history shows that it is rarely done voluntarily. They abide by the external changes and always strive for an accompaniment of homeostasis.
This amusing absoluteness makes an atmosphere appropriate for diversity, which includes anybody; adolescent, old, abandoned and affluent, Hindu or Muslim or Christian. Assortment calls for anniversary being advancing to agreement with his or her attitudes, beliefs, and expectations about others and accepting abundance with the differences.
To achieve from the affluence of talents and perspectives that can alone appear from accepting an advanced array of humans in adjustment of authoritative roles, managements accept to alternation advisers to accept the differences that abide aural cultures and as well amount the similarities that abide amid capricious cultures.
Even to absorb humans with altered backgrounds and characteristics who are able with appropriate skills, organisations accept to ensure that such advisers are not appropriate for their different claimed and cultural ancestry as the amount of inclined behaviour in the organisation; they may acquire their own way to other firms who wish them on their own terms.
Different organisations are viewing diversity’ in different ways. By diversity, we commonly mean differences based on ethnicity, gender, age, religion, disability, national origin and sexual orientation.
But technically speaking, “diversity goes beyond these visibilities and encompasses an infinite range of individuals’ unique characteristics and experiences including communication styles, physical characteristics such as height and weight, speed of learning and comprehension, socioeconomics, and education” (Anthony, 2005, p. 1).
The diversities associated with education, socioeconomic and work experience are, of course, considered more critical for organisational success today. In this context, diversity has become a resource for organisations.
In the workplace, diversity, if properly managed, optimises the willingness and ability of all employees to contribute to the organisational success by encouraging each employee to draw fully on the talents, different points of view, skills, and practices that have been brought into the system for the benefit of both the individual and the organisation.
Today, flourishing companies are taking action to appeal people who are blessed with talents, adventures and perspectives, socioeconomic accomplishments and again to alone and aggregately empower them to accord aggregate they accept in adjustment to attain business objectives.
The ambition of assortment is not to calculate humans by category, but to account from the best mix of humans of such a category. It is the organisations that could instil variety into the organisation in tune with their eyes and cardinal objectives accept reaped added benefits.
Different Dimensions
People exhibit abundant differences in how they recognize changes in the organisation based on claimed characteristics. Of course, there is a hypothesis in psychology, which says that behaviour of an individual is an action of the being interacting with his or her environment. For example, an annoyed worker gets balked while alive for a close that requires approval of place from abounding levels.
That is how assortment in the workforce fosters mixed responses, ideas, and outputs in the organisation. Researchers observe particularly seven major differences: Humans alter in productivity; humans alter in adeptness and talent; humans differ in their ability for accomplishing top superior results; humans alter in how abundant they wish to be empowered and involved; humans alter in the appearance of administration they adopt and need; humans alter in their charge for acquaintance with added people; and humans alter in their bulk of charge and adherence to the firm.
Personality differences are another source of diversity. The personality factors such as sociability, affecting stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, artlessness to experience, self-monitoring of behaviour and affecting intelligence make an impact on employee’s achievement at work places. It determines how an employee gathers and evaluates information.
Sensation displays individuals’ ability to accept and orderliness in their job action area as employees’ admiration to accept an all-embracing viewpoint and as well adore analytic new problems. Feeling blazon humans are about conformists and by all agency try to abstain disagreement. Contrarily, cerebration blazon individuals await added on their ability rather than affect to break problems.
It is believed that a diverse work force is always superior to a homogenous group. A heterogeneous group is proved to be capable of producing higher-quality ideas and is likely to take quality decisions for greater the diversity, greater will be the innovation in the organisation.
A company’s mere willingness to employ diverse workforce such as people from different races, genders, cultural backgrounds, the disabled, etc., may make it a darling of the market and thus give a boost to its market cap and sales volumes (Gregory, 1980).
Organisation image: The image of an organisation follows same connotations and meanings as that carried by an individual in real life. The organisations also exhibit same traits and behaviour as exhibited by individuals.
So organisations must create a culture that values diversity; practices policies that foster mutual respect, a sense of belonging for all, and the acceptance of differences, promote a culture where diversity is valued; and corporate wide diversity training serves to promote this image.
Concern for equality: In their practices, organisations must demonstrate equal respect for minority and majority group members. To achieve this, companies must develop performance expectations and reward systems that are unbiased. Often, minority-group members feel that they work harder than majority group members, but still are not compensated equally (Orlando, 2000).
Career development: Companies that want to create a climate where diversity is valued must promote minority group members with the opportunity for development and promotion. Most important, they must provide minorities an access to top-level management positions. Minorities who hold high-level positions can send a message to those in the lower ranks that this is a company that values diversity.
Hiring practices: Organisations must work hard to recruit and hire multicultural employees. At the same time companies must provide those prospective workers with an opportunity to be hired into well-paying positions, equal to the opportunities extended to majority groups. Companies can benefit from setting goals and guidelines for minority hiring.
Unfortunately, some organisations seek to build a diverse work group by hiring many minority group workers into low-paying, unskilled positions. Rather than creating an image of a positive multicultural environment, however, this crowding of minorities at lower positions fosters negative feelings. Minority members sense that they must do the “dirty work” and feel they are being used by the organisation (John, 1982).
Benefits of Workplace Diversity
In the global economy, lack of cross-cultural understanding among the business people may lead to delays in getting the job done right, poor performance, decreased revenues and lost opportunities. Similarly, the need for adaptability is found to be quite essential for success in the globalised economy and diversity enhances adaptability.
It is only by employing a wide assortment of people; richness of talents and perspectives can be brought into organisations. There are thus more than one reason why companies deliberately take initiatives to build diversity among its employees, of course, in tune with its stated vision and mission statements.
Organisations that manage their diverse workers can increase their productivity substantially through many ways, one of which is increased problem-solving ability. Such productivity may result from increase in creativity that has been hypothesised to be related to heterogeneity. For example, bilingualism and biculturalism have been found to be related to divergent thinking, which in turn has been hypothesised to be associated with creativity (John, 1995).
Recently, it has been demonstrated that ethnic heterogeneity in small groups is associated with increased quality of ideas generated for solving problems. Increased heterogeneity also brings in another benefit the prevention of group think phenomenon that occurs only in cohesive groups.
Such factors however depend on how factors such as amount of diversity, ease of discussing differences, cultural awareness training, and background information on group members affect the quality of idea generation.
With the advent of digital economy one of the greatest challenges facing the organisations is the increasing diversity of workforce. It has become an essential business concern. There is a talent war raging among companies to retain their best talent in a bid to retain their competitive advantage. Diversity management and change management go hand in hand.
They mutually support each other (Anton, 1970). Organisations that adapt themselves to change are more likely to be comfortable with managing diversity better. Likewise, organisations are comfortable with diversity and are more likely to be able to anticipate and adapt to changes in the globalised business environment.
They will be nimble footed to react instantaneously to the situational demands. It is known that organisations that are ready to accept changes can be stronger inherently as it would benefit them in terms of achieving adaptability to manage complexity, contradictions, and paradoxes.
Office technology has felt the revolutionary nature of change the most. The technological sophistication is a natural enabler to the manage diversity in a planned and systematic manner. Technology offers a level playing field to each individual regardless of gender, race, age, and so on. It is a great equaliser (Bertallanfy, 1968).
It eliminates the human bias. Electronic meeting is case to point as an example. It is a way of exchange ideas for free. Everyone has an active participative role shot. An electronic meeting paves the way for a secured atmosphere in which ideas and suggestions can be shared and proposed easily.
As a marketing strategy in today’s global economy it makes eminent sense to make the workforce represented by people from all walks of life covering a broad spectrum like different ethnicities, races, ages, abilities, genders.
To ensure that their articles and casework are advised to address to this assorted chump base, advancing companies are hiring people, from those walks of activity for their specialised insights and knowledge.
Similarly, companies having direct interface with the clientele are finding increasingly important to match the profile of the workforce with the profile of their customer base. Homogeneous workforce always result in less external interaction and communication and companies that retain such a workforce would not be effective in framing policies and programmes in consultation with people of different tastes and preferences.
To stay competitive the workforce diversity helps the companies as a capacity-building strategy. They need to sprint in order to stay where they are. The dynamics of change is no more evolutionary in nature rather it is revolutionary.
Companies that advance accept the accommodation to actually break problems, bound acclimate to new situations, readily analyse new opportunities and capitalise on them instantaneously. The scope of talent, experience, knowledge, insight, and acuteness accessible in their workforces can go a continued way in architecture the accommodation for the enterprise.
Whatever may be reasons that prompt companies, it is an obvious fact that companies that diversify their workforces will have a distinct advantage over those that don’t. The huge allowances of workforce diversity will be experienced, not by the companies that accept abstruse to apply humans in animosity of their differences, but by the companies that accept abstruse to apply humans because of them.
Diversity Management and implementation of diversity policy
The acceptation of workforce diversity has been a cause for worry in contemporary years. Not continued ago, diversity referred to a person’s gender or indigenous group.
Diversity today encompasses differences in age, administration in an organisation, educational background, human acclimatisation or preference, concrete abilities or qualities and amusing status, bread-and-butter status, lifestyle, religion, ethnicity, and genders a part of abounding added characteristics (James, 2001).
Also the abstract suggests that diversity administration refers to efforts to animate a amalgamate workforce to accomplish up to its abounding abeyant in an candid plan ambiance area no one accumulation has advantage or disadvantage. Its focus is on alone differences rather than ability differentials. The main arguments identified in these definitions can be summarised by defining diversity as:
Diversity is an authoritative behaviour, which acknowledges and ethics differences and similarities a part of humans and how the differences can plan to advance the organisation. It as well agency compassionates the authoritative environments with an acknowledgment for gender, culture, and indigenous lifestyles.
Developing and maintaining programs that foster diversity have proven difficult for companies in which embracing diversity amounts to a cultural change. Because, company cultures are deeply rooted and the resulting beliefs are widely held, and culture is difficult to change.
Many organisations have attempted to find quick fixes for diversity enhancements, but sooner or later those firms have learned that there is no such thing as a quick fix. Fostering and managing diversity requires a comprehensive and carefully planned approach.
Given below is a diversity management model that the authors have developed through extensive literature review and issues raised by researchers and scholars in the field. The differences in ethnicity, culture, gender, age, and lifestyle impart variety of perspectives to the workplace.
All perspectives are not only essential but should be actively sought. The spirit of alternate regard, cooperation and investment through acquainted accomplishment to advance development of agents leads to synergy the action in which alive calm yields after-effects greater than the sum of alone efforts.
Proactively create and sustain an internal climate of equal opportunity for all through work force development initiatives such as job growth opportunities, through mentoring, job shadowing and training, tuition reimbursement, employee recognition, and improved communication on relevant issues and activities.
The link between workplace diversity and good management
The organisations are also waking up to the fact that managing workplace diversity is imperative. Though organisations acknowledge the importance of maintaining a diverse workforce, efforts are not in tandem with the prominence given to the issue.
Workforce diversity is throwing up complexities no doubt, but looking at the broader picture, we see that there has been a movement from simple to complex in all realms of the workplace.
System thinking has replaced a simplistic cause- effect relationship. Managements are trying to integrate and benefit from a diverse workforce by coming up with options like flexi time benefits. Gender diversity training programs aimed at highlighting the politically correct work practices and individual behaviours are gaining popularity worldwide (Christopher, 2000).
The flip side is that some managers feel that increased workforce diversity may cause management problems. Diversity brings with it the need for more flexibility, which makes management more complicated (e.g., scheduling, compensation plans, interpersonal communication, ethnic differences) (Philip, 1974).
The crux of the issue lies in the fact that women in workforce is a reality and the aim of organisations must be to think of how best to harness this vast pool of talent and not glorify the issues as complications.
The boards of companies, which expressed faith and backed their women employees, have been rewarded handsomely. Management research is now focusing on a feminine style of management that highlights the success of adopting a feminine or a softer approach to managing people. Many studies have shown that women in fact can make better managers.
Workforce diversity can be managed only through a change in the mindset. Integrating the people working in an organisation successfully should be a product of the organisational culture and not a stand-alone training program. The day the women in organisations are accepted as being indispensable, just as in a family, that will be the day the term gender diversity with its negative connotations will cease to exist.
Efforts to build a diverse climate and creation of multicultural opportunities will not by themselves create an organisation that values diversity unless management practices reflect this commitment (Robert, 2001). If diversity is to be optimised, top managers must recognise the capabilities of all employees, take their ideas seriously, and support both minority and majority-group employees.
Managers must communicate effectively and accept employees who do not speak the local language. Finally, managers must respect the cultural beliefs and needs of employees and truly value the diversity of the workforce. Strategies that can lead to diversity include diversity-awareness training and the hiring of managers and top executives who reflect variety in gender, race, and ethnicity.
The role administration practices plays in acknowledging assortment highlights the charge to appoint and advance top-level agents associates who are acute to the apropos of multicultural employees. The management can do this by incorporating this in their hiring practices to hire people who are sensitive and can relate to multicultural workforce.
Conclusion
Diversity among workforce becomes an asset business. It enables organisations to have a command over choice. Diversity brings to organisations unique perspectives. Understanding the demographic differences among the workforce can help organisations capitalise on diversity and avoid negative stereotyping.
If managed properly, diversity optimises the willingness and ability of all employees to contribute to organisational success besides, encouraging each to draw fully on the talents, different points of view, skills, and practices that have been made available by diverse workforce. Diversity, if managed badly, can become a liability.
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