Diversity issues in the Workplace

Diversity issues in the Workplace

Introduction

There is a general finding that the labor force has been changing in recent years. The higher diversity occurs in dimensions such as gender, race, nationality, social class, cultural region, age, among many others. Thanks to these changes it becomes necessary for organizations dealing with the impact and management of cultural diversity in the workplace.

Just as women have changed the labor market in the late twentieth century, another strong demographic change is expected for the coming years, and on the age of the workforce. The group of people aged over 65 years, which in 2000 accounted for five percent of the population, expected to grow to 18% by 2050 (Fassinger, 2008).

Besides the diversity surface, which refers to differences in characteristics easily identifiable as demographics, which does not reflect how people think and feel but may activate certain stereotypes, there are deep differences in level that are related to values, character and work preferences, which become progressively more important.

Discussion

The increasing diversity of the workforce has important implications for administrative practices. Administrators need to modify their philosophies, recognizing the differences and respond to them in order to ensure productivity, without committing discrimination. The diversity management deals with the development and establishment of organizational norms that value differences between groups to improve organizational effectiveness (Herring, 2009).

These standards promote a set of clear expectations of how employees should be treated and the type of behavior expected of people. The ways to manage diversity also guide the way in which organizations and their members understand this social phenomenon and draw strategies, organizational standards and values ??that seek to increase the maximum competitive advantage represented by diversity.

Often, organizations deal with diversity only under the logic of discrimination, trying to avoid the bias that affects certain demographic groups. Prejudice can be thought of as a negative attitude, with great emotional charge, before a group and its members, which considers the differences between groups as weaknesses. The bias is linked to the concept of discrimination, which refers to the recognition of a difference between things or persons. Discrimination is not necessarily bad, but normally when using this concept, people refer to let a behavior is influenced by stereotypes about groups of people.

The negative discrimination and unfair, instead of looking at individual characteristics, assumes that everyone in a given social group are equal. This type of discrimination ...