34 Diversity and Its Management

Dr. Radha Kanwal Sharma

1. Learning Outcome

2. Introduction

3. Why Diversity Management

4. Benefits of Diversity Management

5. Issues to be focussed on during diversity management

6. Barriers in accepting diversity

7. Challenges in diversity management

8. How to manage diversity successfully

9. Steps to increase awareness about workforce diversity

10. Recommendations for diversity in the workplace solutions

11. Summary

1. Learning Outcomes:

After completing this module the students will be able to:

· Understand the concepts of diversity management.

· Benefits of diversity in the organization

· Challenges faced during diversity management

· How to manage diversity effectively.

2. Introduction

Diversity encompasses race, gender, ethnic group, age, personality, cognitive style, tenure, organizational function, education, background, and more. Diversity involves not only how people perceive themselves but also how they perceive others. Those perceptions affect their interactions.

Diversity management is a process intended to create and maintain a positive work environment where the similarities and differences of individuals are valued, so that all can reach their potential and maximize their contributions to an organization’s strategic goals and objectives.

With many organizations going global, the international barriers are breaking and world is becoming a global village. It is not uncommon to find people of different backgrounds especially nationalities, working together in an organization. So diversity management has gained lot of importance these days.

Dimensions of diversity: There are two dimensions of workforce diversity: Primary and Secondary.

Primary dimensions: These include age, gender, mental/physical abilities and characteristics, race, ethnic heritage and sexual orientation.

Secondary dimensions: Geographic location, cultural experience, work experience, income, religion, first language, organizational role and level, communication style, family status, work style and education.

3. Why Diversity Management

In these days of globalization and MNC culture, it becomes imperative to manage diversity due to following reasons:

Talent Shortage: Diversity management can help recruit and retain the desired talent which otherwise becomes difficult to get in the same country or region. It can also reduce unwelcomed turn over and absenteeism. In order to get the best out of the workforce, companies should not reject any particular group by gender, race, or religion.

Range of Consumer Needs: In recent years, organizations have recognized the fact that they can best serve different customer groups in different markets with the help of diverse workforce even if the locality or home base of the organization is located in a culturally different market. Because there can be substantial number of customers located in other diverse communities either in organization’s home country or abroad. In communities/locations where other languages dominate, organizations benefit from hiring employees who speak the dominant languages. Globalization: Globalization can be defined as a process when organizations or businesses start to operate at an international scale. When companies are open to internationalize their operations; they choose an efficient location to operate. Prices of inputs vary all over the world, which attract companies to shift some of their production to countries with cheaper inputs such as labor in developing countries for lowering the cost of production. Workforce diversity is a critical measure for companies who seek to establish themselves in such countries. Also when a company is operating in different countries at very large scale (Hindustan Unilever), it becomes imperative to hire people from local country.

4. Benefits of having diverse workforce: Diversity has multiple benefits to the workplace.

1. The major benefit that a company gets from diverse employees is a greater understanding of the global marketplace.

2. When management takes the welfare of its workers at heart by means of offering them proper compensation, health care and employee appraisal, It enables workers to feel they belong to the company irrespective of their cultural background by remaining loyal and hardworking which increases productivity and profit.

3. Each team member brings to the table different ideas (due to diverse background) and offers a unique perspective during problem solving to effectively arrive at the best solution at the shortest possible time.

4. Diversity at the workplace creates an opportunity for employee’s personal growth. When workers are being exposed to new cultures, ideas and perspectives, it helps them to intellectually reach out and have a clearer insight of their place in the global environment and hence their own surroundings

5. Workplace diversity can immensely strengthen a company’s relationship with a specific group of customers by making communication more effective. A customer service personnel can be paired up with customers from hi/her specific area/ country, making the customer feel at home with the representative and thus with the company.

6. A diverse collection of skills and experiences (e.g. languages, cultural understanding) allows a company to provide service to customers on a global basis. Employee and their co-workers that come from a diverse background bring to the table some amount of unique perceptions and experience during teamwork or group tasks. Pooling the diverse skills and knowledge of culturally distinct employees together can immensely benefit the company.

7. Organizations employing a diverse workforce can supply a greater variety of solutions to problems in service, sourcing, and allocation of resources. Employees from diverse backgrounds bring individual talents and experiences in suggesting ideas that are flexible in adapting to fluctuating markets and customer demands.

8. Companies that encourage diversity in the workplace inspire all of their employees to perform to their highest ability. Company-wide strategies can then be executed; resulting in higher productivity, profit, and return on investment.

4.1 Consequences of Ignoring Diversity

Ignoring diversity issues costs time, money, and efficiency. Some of the consequences can include unhealthy tensions; loss of productivity because of increased conflict; inability to attract and retain talented people of all kinds; complaints and legal actions; and inability to retain valuable employees, resulting in lost investments in recruitment and training.

5. Issues to be focused during diversity management

• How to make the job sound appealing to different types of workers?

• How can recruitment be effectively targeted to diverse groups?

• How to overcome bias in the interviewing process, questions, and your response?

• To specify the need for skills to work effectively in a diverse environment in the job;

• To make sure that good faith efforts are made to recruit a diverse applicant pool.

• Need to focus not only the job requirements in the interview, and assess experience but also consider transferable skills and demonstrated competencies, such as analytical, organizational, communication, coordination.

• To implement panel interview format and ensure that the committee is diverse, unit affiliation, job classification, length of service, variety of life experiences, etc. to represent different perspectives and to eliminate bias from the selection process. Making every effort to ensure that there is no unintentional bias.

• To analyze biases prevalent in the organization. What stereotypes does the company has of people from different groups and how well they may perform on the job? What communication styles are preferred in the company? Sometimes what is considered to be appropriate or desirable qualities in a candidate may reflect more about interviewer’s personal preferences than about the skills needed to perform the job.

6. Barriers to accept diversity

It is commonly seen that employees are not comfortable accepting diversity. There is lot of perceptions and bias about people of different communities/ countries in the mind of employees. Despite knowing the fact that diversity is a positive and beneficial factor, sometimes individuals experience numerous personal barriers in accepting diversity (Aswathappa, 2008): These include:

1. Prejudice: It is an unjustified negative attitude towards a person belonging to a particular group.

2. Ethnocentrism: it is the tendency to regard one’s own group/country/ culture or religion as superior to others.

3. Stereotypes: It is the set of beliefs about a group that is applied universally to all members of that group such as “all women are emotionally weaker than men”.

Stereotyping, whether positive or negative, is not good because the statement is not true for all members of the referred group.

4. Discrimination: It refers to barring an individual from membership of an organization or from a job because of his/her membership of a particular group. E.g. a company hiring only men for the top position.

5. Harassment: it is consciously shunning or verbally or physically abusing an individual because of his/ her membership of a particular group.

6. Sexual harassment: It is the process of approaching a person in an unwanted, uninvited, intimate way, interfering with that person’s productivity or advancement.

7. Backlash: It is the negative reaction to the gaining of power and influence by members of previously underrepresented groups, leading to fair, resentment, and reverse discrimination.

7. Challenges of Diversity in the Workplace

Taking full advantage of the benefits of diversity in the workplace is not without its challenges.

Some of those challenges are:

1. Communication – Perceptual, cultural and language barriers need to be overcome for diversity programs to succeed. Ineffective communication of key objectives results in confusion, lack of teamwork, and low morale.

2. Resistance to change – There are always employees who will refuse to accept the fact that the social and cultural makeup of their workplace is changing. The “we’ve always done it this way” mentality silences new ideas and inhibits progress.

3. Implementation of diversity in the workplace policies – This can be the overriding challenge to all diversity advocates. Armed with the results of employee assessments and research data, they must build and implement a customized strategy to maximize the effects of diversity in the workplace for their particular organization.

4. Successful Management of Diversity in the Workplace – Diversity training alone is not sufficient for your organization’s diversity management plan. A strategy must be created and implemented to create a culture of diversity that permeates every department and function of the organization.

8. How to manage diversity effectively

Managing diversity involves various steps like increasing awareness, increasing diversity skills, encouraging cultural and gender diversity and commitment of top management towards diversity management.

8.1Increasing Awareness:

Diversity management programmes should strive to increase managers’ and workers’ awareness of

· Their own attitude, biases and stereotypes

· The differing perspectives of diverse managers, subordinates, co workers and customers. Diversity management programmes have following goals:

· Providing organization members with accurate information on diversity;

· Recognition of personal biases and stereotypes;

· Assessing personal beliefs, attitudes, values and learning about others’ point of view;

· Overturning inaccurate stereotypes and beliefs about different groups;

· Developing an atmosphere in which employees feel free to share their different perspectives and points of view;

· Improving understanding of others who are different from oneself.

8.2 Increasing Diversity Skills

Efforts to enhance diversity skills focus on improving the way managers and their subordinates interact with each other and improving their ability to work with different kinds of people. Guiding managers and their subordinates about why and how people differ in the ways they think, communicate , approach issues and situations helps all employees of the organization, to develop a healthy respect for diversity and at the same time facilitate mutual understanding.

8.3 Cultural Diversity

Major challenge to OB experts is to utilize the wealth of differences provided by cultural diversity. But prejudices and stereotypes usually prevent managers and employees from developing synergies that can help the entire organization. To combat this problem, the strategies can be developed at individual as well as organizational levels.

For individuals:

1. Live and work outside your home country. Be willing to take an overseas assignment whenever there is an opportunity.

2. Travel extensively outside your home country.

3. Try to adapt to the customs of the new country while travelling.

4. Try to gel with local residents to get the feel of that country.

5. Develop friendships with people from nationalities other than your own. Learn about their culture, customs, the ways they conduct business, differences and similarities between your own country and their country.

6. Learn some foreign language relevant to you.

7. Work at developing a non home country perspective on world events.

8. Subscribe to newspapers and periodicals that broaden your understanding of key issues from multinational perspective.

9. Before travelling to other country for business, learn in advance about their cultural differences and customs that will affect the way in the business will be conducted there.

For organizations:

1. Offer language training to your employees.

2. Encourage your employees to accept non home country work assignment.

3. Provide transition counseling to employees and their families both before and after a non home country assignment.

4. Provide training to help employees learn about and be sensitive to cross cultural differences.

5. Examine your employment practices to ensure that your company is not intentionally or unintentionally discriminating against anyone due to his/her religion or ethnicity.

8.4 Gender Diversity

The feminization of the workforce has increased substantially. However, stereotyping beliefs about gender often limit one’s ability to work closely and effectively with the opposite sex. Understanding that these beliefs are generally stereotypes, will allow individuals and organizations to move away from discriminating in rating false assumptions while managing and working with diverse groups. One way is to recognize that there are strengths in both the sexes. Men can learn from women’s managerial style by using appropriate relationships building in the workplace, while women can learn from men’s style to be less subtle and more assertive and direct, especially while giving instructions.

8.5 Commitment of top management

In spite of having dedicated diversity management programmes, stereotypes have been most common problem faced by top management in handling diversity. Managers are advised by experts, not to treat someone as special because he/ she is a member of an important group, but because of the unique skills or abilities he/ she brings to the job. To the extent that managers are trained to seek, recognize and reward talents of their employees regardless of the group to which they belong, they will help break down the barriers that made diversity training necessary in the first place.

Following steps have been proven successful in world-class organizations in management of diversity:

Assessment of diversity in the workplace – Top companies make assessing and evaluating their diversity process an integral part of their management system. A customizable employee satisfaction survey can accomplish this assessment for your company efficiently and conveniently. It can help your management team determine which challenges and obstacles to diversity are present in your workplace and which policies need to be added or eliminated. Reassessment can then determine the success of you diversity in the workplace plan implementation.

Development of diversity in the workplace plan – Choosing a survey provider that provides comprehensive reporting is a key decision. That report makes basis of diversity in the workplace plan. The plan must be comprehensive, attainable and measurable. An organization must decide what changes need to be made and a timeline for that change to be attained.

Implementation of diversity in the workplace plan – The personal commitment of executive and managerial teams is a must. Leaders and managers within organizations must incorporate diversity policies into every aspect of the organization’s function and purpose. Attitudes toward diversity originate at the top and filter downward. Management cooperation and participation is required to create a culture conducive to the success of the organization’s plan.

9. Steps to increase awareness about work force diversity

Following steps are helpful while creating awareness about diversity in the minds of employees of the organization

Reducing prejudices and use of stereotypes

• Recognizing that diversity exists and learning to value and respect fundamental differences

• Admitting to one’s own biases and prejudices and committing to reduce them

• Dismissing myths about diverse others when in a group of friends or associates

Minimizing miscommunication with diverse others

• Educating oneself about differences by reading, listening, and broadening one’s experience base about diverse people

• Communicating effectively by listening attentively and asking questions about what one did not

understand

• Avoiding terms that spotlight certain groups and imply the individual is an exception

• Avoiding valuing one’s message based on dress, mannerisms, accent, or eye contact

Building relationships with diverse others

• Forming positive relationship with diverse others

• Seeking feedback from diverse others about how well one is communicating respect for them and valuing their diversity

• Treating diverse others as invited guests by showing interest in them rather than treating them as strangers

10. Recommendations for diversity in the workplace solutions

It is clear now that as the economy becomes increasingly global, the workforce becomes increasingly diverse. Organizational success and competitiveness depends on the ability to manage diversity in the workplace effectively. Listed below are some recommendations to make an organization’s diversity policies and plan more effective.

Ward off resistance to change with inclusion: Involve every employee possible in formulating and executing diversity initiatives in your workplace.

Foster an attitude of openness in your organization: Encourage employees to express their ideas and opinions and attribute a sense of equal value to all.

Promote diversity in leadership positions: This practice provides visibility and realizes the benefits of diversity in the workplace.

Utilize diversity training: it should be utilized as a tool to shape company’s diversity policy.

Launch a customized employee satisfaction survey that provides comprehensive reporting:

Its results should be used to build and implement successful diversity in the workplace policies.

11. Summary

Workplace diversity refers to the variety of differences between people in an organization. It means bringing together people of different ethnic backgrounds, religions and age groups into a cohesive and productive unit. Advances in communication technology, such as the Internet and cellular phones, have made the marketplace a more global concept. In order to survive, a company needs to be able to manage and utilize its diverse workplace effectively. Managing diversity in the workplace has become a part of the culture of the entire organization. Diversity management is a process intended to create and maintain a positive work environment where the similarities and differences of individuals are valued, so that all can reach their potential and maximize their contributions to an organization’s strategic goals and objectives.

The major benefit that a company gets from diverse employees is a greater understanding of the global marketplace. Each team member brings to the table different ideas (due to diverse background) and offers a unique perspective during problem solving to effectively arrive at the best solution at the shortest possible time. Diversity at the workplace creates an opportunity for employee’s personal growth. When workers are being exposed to new cultures, ideas and perspectives, it helps them to intellectually reach out and have a clearer insight of their place in the global environment and hence their own surroundings. Ignoring diversity issues costs time, money, and efficiency. Some of the consequences can include unhealthy tensions; loss of productivity because of increased conflict; inability to attract and retain talented people of all kinds; complaints and legal actions; and inability to retain valuable employees, resulting in lost investments in recruitment and training. Managing diversity involves various steps like increasing awareness, increasing diversity skills, encouraging cultural and gender diversity and commitment of top management towards diversity management.

As the economy becomes increasingly global, the workforce becomes increasingly diverse. Organizational success and competitiveness depends on the ability to manage diversity in the workplace effectively.

Learn More:

Aswathappa,K. (2008). Organizational Behaviour. Himalaya Publishing House, New Delhi
Gupta, S.K., Joshi, Rosy. (2013). Organizational Behaviour. Kalyani Publishers, New Delhi
Prasad, L.M. (2009). Organizational Behaviour. Sultan Chand & Sons, New Delhi
Robbins, S., Timothy.A.J.,Sanghi, S. (2009). Organizational Behaviour: Text and Cases. Pearson Prentice Hall, New Delhi
http://www.multiculturaladvantage.com/recruit/diversity/diversity-in-the-workplace-benefits-challenges-solutions.asp
http://sgo.sagepub.com/content/2/2/2158244012444615
www.aaeod.ucsf.edu.
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www.tamu.edu