MANAGING FOR DIVERSITY

Managing FOR Diversity

Managing for diversity

Introduction

The strategic importance of human resources has resulted from massive changes in goods and services production systems. In the earlier industrial systems, people were operationally or tactically important with respect to the final products. For example, the employees were taken as an operational resource in the case, where they served merely as common labor from which the physical products or other routine services were derived. (Hill 2005) Early manufacturing and office operations were based on an industrial form of organization, where specialized bundles of tasks, duties, and responsibilities defined the positions into which people were placed. Such organizations were appropriate subjects for studying for the industrial engineers, such as Frederick W. Taylor, whose observations about work methods and organizational efficiency were implicitly based on the widespread existence of simple, repetitive routines and products.

Discussion

Diversity

Although there are a number of definitions of diversity, it refers to the human characteristics that make people different from one another. There could be a number of sources of diversity in workforce, however, in general it can be grouped into two categories, individual characteristics; these are the characteristics, which cannot control, these characteristics include some biological characteristics such as race, gender, the age, certain psychological attributes, family, also the impact of the society and the environment, in which a person has grown up. These factors exert a powerful influence on the individual's identity and directly affect how a person relates to others (Griffin 2007, 89). 

The second category consists of the individual characteristics that a person adopts, rejects or tends to change during their life, with conscious and deliberate efforts. These characteristics include employment history, income, marital status, military experience, political beliefs, geographic location and education. 

It is important to remember this distinction between the sources of diversity and the concept of diversity in itself. Without this distinction, one could tend to make fallacy of stereotyping.  The fallacy stereotyping is said to occur when we apply the characteristics of a certain member of a group to the whole group. For example, employees who have had military experience are often accepted in companies with the hope that they would possess an authoritarian management style. In fact, many military veterans reject an organization that has a bureaucratic management style, and it is not necessary that the people, who have worked in the military, would be fond of the authoritarian management style.

Why manage employee diversity?

Unless the management of the company has exceptionally good management skills, the diversity among employees can create misunderstandings among the employees that can make a negative impact on the productivity and teamwork of the emplo. Besides being illegal, to exclude some people to participate actively in the workplace just because they belong to a certain group creates a negative impact of the environment of the organization and prevents people from contributing their best for the organization and this in turn effects the effectiveness of their work. For the survival and prosperity in a heterogeneous society that is becoming increasingly complex, organizations have to capitalize on the ...