The importance of managing workforce diversity (Essay Sample)

The importance of managing workforce diversity
Name
Professor
Institution
Course
Date
The importance of managing workforce diversity
Introduction
The importance of managing workforce diversity for today’s managers is crucial for organization success. The role of organizational culture in developing an inclusive organization environment that embraces and takes advantage of the organization’s diversity cannot be underestimated. I would agree with the statement using the words of the former U.S president, John F. Kennedy. He once stated that "If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can assist make the world safe for diversity." With the market for products and services becoming more and more globalized, businesses have to adopt the concept of diversity in their workforce to enable them serve customers from different cultural background. The world's increase in globalization needs more interaction amongst individuals from diverse backgrounds, cultures and beliefs than before (Barbosa & Cabral-Cardoso 2007, p.281). Individuals no longer work and live in an inward-looking market; they are currently part of a global market with competition emerging from almost every continent.
Just maintaining a diverse employee is no longer sufficient, Kundu (2003, p.217) argues that, for an organization to succeed in the present challenging economy, it should not just satisfy the demands of a multifaceted market, it should respect diverse cultures, philosophies and ideas. Owing to the challenges people sometimes hold in integrating different perspectives in organizational settings, managing diverse workforce in a place of work is essential (Iverson 2000, p.36). Organization’s or group’s diversity can comprise of diversity across culture, sex, religion, race, and age but can also consist of diversity across personality types and work skills. All of these diversities can influence group relations and performance. Based on the information discussed above, this essay defines workforce diversity, diversity management and discusses the importance of managing workforce diversity. Some of the significance of diversity management that will be discussed includes organizational culture, ideas, flexibility, innovation, talent attraction, improvement in decision making, and cultural intelligence.
Workforce diversity and diversity management
According to Ivancevich & Gilbert (2000, p.76) diversity refers to a coexistence of workforce from different socio-cultural settings in the organization. It comprises of cultural aspects such as ethnicity, gender, physical ability, color and age among others. In organizational perspective, diversity normally means a range of human resources, suppliers, and customers in terms of work experience, educational background, income, sexual orientation, geographic location, gender, physical qualities and abilities, e.tc (Cornelius, Gooch & Todd 2000, p.78). To rise above the challenges of workforce diversity, a new strategy rose in the 1980s which became identified as the diversity management. Ivancevich and Gilbert (2000, p. 75) defines diversity management as "the planned and systematic commitment by business to hire, retain, promote and reward a heterogeneous mix of workforce”. Diversity is advantageous to both the employees and organization.
Also as mentioned above, diversity brings considerable prospective benefits like better problem solving and decision making; great creativity and innovation that results to improved product development and effective marketing to different categories of consumers (Cornelius, Gooch & Todd, 2000, p.81). Diversity offers organizations with capability to compete in international markets. As a management prospect, various approaches to handling workforce diversity, discrimination and prejudice have been put forth, such as the pragmatic and managerial to more legalistic ways of valuing diversity. Hicks-Clarke & Iles (2000, p.324), argues that managing diversity actually start by creating organizational climate that supports the act. The organizational climate is strongly impacted by the organizational culture and the insight of organizational processes by people in the organizations.
The framework formulated here contends that to ensure that managing diversity becomes fruitful; the business requires developing an encouraging climate for the diversity. Climate alone facilitates satisfaction, positive attitude and commitment among the employees (Hicks-Clarke & Iles 2000, p.327). Organizations understand that they have to be decisive to efficiently manage an ever more diverse, global labor force so as to do well in its performance. In a nutshell, the better performance of any organizations depends on the capability of managing a diverse pool of talent which can provide innovative views, ideas and perspectives to their daily operations (Fujimoto, Hartel & Azmat 2013, p.149). Managing diversity implies facilitating the diverse labor force to carry out its potential in an impartial work setting in which on particular team has advantage or disadvantage over the other.
Barbosa & Cabral-Cardoso (2007, p.279) claim that organizations which pursue this direction will likely to also cut costs related to turnover, stress, absenteeism, lawsuits associated with discrimination, and low output of minority employees. The framework created here hypothesizes that to ensure managing diversity become successful; the organization needs requires creating a positive environment for diversity (Hicks-Clarke & Iles 2000, p.331). Managing diverse workforce well with focus on motivation, performance and retention is likely to lead to workforce who are contented with their work, their superiors, and, who are loyal to their organizations. According to Pless & Maak (2004, p.130) managing diversity requires building and promoting culture of communication in which trust and inclusion are part of day to day activities – by incorporating different views to problem-solving and decision–making practices, by paying attention to and making an effort to understand different perspectives, by valuing divergent views and arguing fairly, and by analyzing better argument amongst the validation arguments. To manage diversity effectively, the manager needs to understand particular differences and be able to employ them to the company advantage rather than allowing the differences to results to problems (Rajput, Marwah, Balli & Gupta 2013, p.137).
Organizational culture
The relation of culturally diverse employees is not without challenges, like the increased turnover amongst employees from the leading group, the declining team integration, and the communication obstacles (Day, 2007, p.214) so as to overcome the impediments and to capitalize on a diverse workforce, many researchers claim that organizations have to build cultures that value, support and welcome diversity. Because, it turned out to be prominent in the field of management in the 1980s, organizational culture is considered as an original and strong tool to analyze and understand the human actions in the place of work (Barbosa & Cabral-Cardoso, 2007, p.279). Organizational culture is described as the collection of practices, values, beliefs and norms which point out to its members the proper behaviors in every particular situation.
To be recognized in the place of work, novices are advised to embrace the existing organizational principles and artifacts (Stoner & Russell-Chaplin 1997, p.7), while existing employees tend "to be suspicious of, dislike and fear individuals with different ideas" it is healthy for organization to remain innovative (Willcoxson & Millett 2000, p.93). Businesses have a tendency to attract and retain people from similar demographic and social settings and to discriminate different ones in the recruitment, selection, informal integration and career development (Van Knippenberg & Schippers 2007, p.516). Diversity need a develop organizational culture in which each staff can embark on his or her career targets without being hindered nationality, gender, religion, race, lifestyle, disability and belief among other factors which are extraneous to performance. According to Willcoxson & Millett (2000, p.95) strong cultures particularly demand employees to formulate unilateral efforts so as to fit into the values and norms which are in place.
One unfortunate thing that contradicts the importance of managing diverse workforce is that in most organizational settings, members of strong cultures are allowed to share values, quality judgments and ideologies, while those who look to disagree with these shared cultural aspects risk being punished (Lewis 2001, p.22). Some managers think the people who contradict a decision are radical and may influence other members of the workforce to rebel against the top management. Actually, managing workforce diversity is not easy and requires a manager who has experience in working it different cultural background and has the cultural intelligence to solve problems of that nature (Hoobler, Basadur & Lemmon 2007, p.2). For an organizational culture to be managed properly it must first be defined, since the definitions of culture impacts strategies to managing that culture. Iverson (2000, p.31) posits that Just like managing it, defining organizational culture is not a simple job, for sometimes there is broad agreement concerning the elements of culture as an extensive construct.
Experts who look at the issue of managing diverse workforce from the pluralist perspective and recognize their existence in organizations with regards to professional affiliation, status, and social interactions, claim that organizational success comes from the effective management of diversity (Kundu 2003, p.216). They also argue that o...