MANAGING DIVERSITY

Managing Diversity

Managing Diversity

Introduction

In today's workplace numerous find themselves in a tug of conflict between their individual and organizational values, both strolling an ethical tightrope particularly when worker and business values compete. With the supplemented complexity of an international business market, heritage dissimilarities amidst distinct assemblies of stakeholder often compete.

The organizations these days have been experiencing resilience, change and increasing competition at a much faster rate. The speed of innovation, creativity and productivity is rapidly increasing and only the privileged organizations, which allow themselves no leverage, are able to sustain in such a pressurized and competitive environment of the global business. Many large and medium sized organizations have adopted such strategies which have given them increased profitability, and generated faster revenues for them. The common and much dominant feature of today's organizations is increasing workforce diversity in the organizations. The heterogeneity of the labor force has become one of the essential features of the modern organizations.

Diversity management

Diversity management means constructive social diversity by fighting the discrimination, social exclusion and promoting equal opportunities to all the employees in the organization. The term diversity management refers to the fact that employers do not show a biased attitude among the applicants and employees of different origin, gender and age. For heterogeneous groups have a variety of features that companies should take advantage of, it should have the intentions of hiring and recruiting the labor force from all the origins. Thus, an organization can be successful, if all the employees in its staff work well together. The team structure may be destroyed by discrimination or exclusion of individuals or groups. But that is not only at the expense of the individual but is, indirectly, a heavy cost to the detriment of the whole company.

Diversity management goes back to the grass roots movement from the United States of America. In 1960s, the women and the civil rights movements were conducted which were acting together against discrimination. This movement tends to work for the elimination of discrimination from being practiced with the minorities and with particular group of people. To cater to such situations, the term 'diversity management' was introduced which refers to the not only protecting the concerned parties but also to encourage them and make them active professionally. The negation to such management results in the unfair behavior towards employees on the basis of gender, age, ethnicity, disability, appearance, lifestyle, sexual orientation, religion and other factors which are not directly related to the job description of the employees.

For instance, various studies show that a candidate with a foreign name with the same qualifications gets significantly less invitations for a job interview as compared to his competitor which is contrary to the diversity management. Thus, the diversity management is practiced in the organizations in order to ensure the equality and fairness in the management of employees. This also enables the business benefit from the special skills such as language skills or a deep understanding of the culture of a business partner of ...