Diversity And Diversity Management: An Essay

Abstract

Write an essay about the diversity and diversity management.
 

This essay is an extension of the previous essay on the topic of diversity and diversity management. In the first essay, I highlighted the effect of diversity on different organizations. I showed that institution either entirely benefits from it or lose from it. By review of the different literature, it revealed that organization and its performance are not affected by diversity. In this essay, I want to argue this topic further and show that organization is dependent on a variety of their activities and performance. For example Kaiser (2013), showed that organizational diversity structures create discrimination by dividing people into a high-status group and low under presented groups. But other research also gave solutions to dispel discrimination at the workplace. On the other hand, Stephen and Jiatao (2016) highlighted that international and product diversity affects the performance of multinational firms. Moreover Anne et al. (2013) stated that knowledge of different factors in diversity management is beneficial for team performance in increasing diversity workforce. According to Shung et al. (2012), they tested the team diversity in various team members of Chinese Company. It showed that group diversity positively influences creativity in an organization.  Another study by Ayse (2012) demonstrated that diversity and diversity management in society. It explained that people can benefit from planned steps of diversity management.

The response to the feedback of the first essay is that it was inconsistent on explanations of the effect of diversity in the organization. It did not give a clear idea about the effect of diversity. It was not proved by valid evidence. So in these essays, I want to correct the shortcomings of the first essay by giving precise tests and viewpoints on the topic by different authors. I will address the problem by using various data collected from the study from a different organization. I hope these essays will effectively cover the weakness of the first essay and fulfil the purpose of this essay. Therefore, this essay has an improved structure, accurate citation, proper referencing, a logical flow and consistent terminology. 

This section introduces diversity and it management in society. Diversity in a social context is defined as the identifiable difference in cultural backgrounds and lifestyle of people in the particular organization. Diversity can be classified in some ways like racial or ethnic diversity, gender, religion, intelligence, mental health, identifying, features, etc. Diversity management is the practice of addressing and supporting different lifestyles and different characters within a particular group or organizations. The different kind of management activities includes support and respect for race, culture, society, geography, economic and political background. Diversity management is the technique of adapting strategies and implementing best practises to create an inclusive workplace environment. A diverse group of people can be managed through efficient use different employee groups, mentoring and sponsorship by Diversity Councils and managing various suppliers. According to Diversity Inc., they have assessed the success of diversity management through a collection of data on a variety of Companies in 14 year period. They analyzed top 50 Companies by a survey which is displayed daily as articles and case studies on The Web. It gives useful information about best practises within top 50 Companies.

Introduction to Diversity Management

When people think about diversity, the first thing that comes to their mind is diversity related to race and gender. But diversity has much broader perspective. Diversity is also about different qualities of individual according to the difference in geographic location and culture. All this kind of diversity has an effect on performance, motivation and interaction with various people. Often organizations have to face challenges due to discriminatory institutional structure and practises. Managing a diverse group does not only means complying with legal and policy requirements, but it also means actively promoting community and comfort within a diverse group. Diversity is, in fact, beneficial to any group as it contributes richness and new skills as a whole.

With the growth of diversity in workforce throughout the world, companies have adopted specific policies for enhancing recruitment, inclusion, promotion and retention of employees. Each country has their privileged groups like White Men in the Unites States and Protestant in Ireland and disadvantaged groups like lower caste in India and African immigrants in France. Legislation on equal rights has given a lower section of society access to more jobs and better involvement in the workplace. The aim of diversity management policy is to create a comfortable environment for those groups who suffered a lot in the past and had no lucrative job opportunities (Pieterse et al., 2013).

According to cross-level interaction by Shin et al. (2012), they researched on the relationship between cognitive team diversity and individual member creativity. They tested how cognitive team diversity has the positive effect on individual’s creativity. After observing 316 employees of 68 teams in a Chinese Company based on hierarchical linear modelling results, they found that self-efficacy of team members was the factor for moderation of relationship between team diversity and individual creativity (Kirton & Greene, 2015). They found the relationship to be directly proportional to creative self-efficacy. Thus greater self-efficacy meant smooth handling of team diversity. A workforce with diverse groups can be managed only by transformation leadership. A transformational leader can create such a relationship that would give positive results to creativity only when transformational leadership is high (Shin et al., 2012).

According to another literature review done on the role of team member orientation, factors influencing cultural diversity are of great importance. After completion and extension of earlier research, a theory was developed to test how different types of achievement influences goal orientation of team members (Ferraro & Brody, 2015). They discovered that achievement setting activated both team member goal orientations as the well diversity-performance relationship. In two types of research, they identified that goal orientation is the factors for enhancing performance in a culturally diverse team (Gong et al., 2013). The more a group has elaborate information about team members the more they can benefit from it and directs their goal to the right way. A positive result is seen in the culturally diverse team when individual team members approach to learning is high. Such team has very low-performance avoidance tendency and they continuously look forward to enhancing their performance. The practical result is delivered by elaboration of team information (Pieterse et al., 2013). 

Challenges in Managing Diverse Groups

According to research by Simons et al. (2010), he found out how different diversity variables and debate interacted to affect the financial performance of a company. In his study Simons et al. (2010) examined that in top companies managing team diversity, two aspects of Companies financial performance was affected by diversity variables and debate interaction. The assessed the extent to which comprehensive decision making brought useful interaction results. They collected detailed information from top management teams of 57 manufacturing companies and found that when job-related diversity interaction took place in debate among team members, it lead to better financial performance. But when there was less job-related diversity such diversity in age, such result was not found. Here also the comprehensive ability of decision making affected the performance of a diverse team (Simons et al., 2010).

In some institutions, organizational diversity cause unnecessary division of team members into lower and higher class group and it results in discrimination. In of the research by Kaiser et al. (2013), they tested the hypothesis that presence of organizational diversity causes high-status members (White men) to think that under presented group (racial minority) got fair chance in the organization, but that was not the reality (Bauman et al., 2014). These lower group people subjected to unlawful activities and they become the disadvantaged group in such organizations. So the thinking that everyone gets a fair chance is just an illusion and not truth. This illusionary thinking of fairness causes the high-status group to become less sensitive to discrimination done on such individuals and they react very harshly on lower members group when they claim that they had been discriminated (Böhm et al., 2014). This hypothesis was supported by six experimental designs using four types of diversity structures like diversity policies, diversity training, diversity award and idiosyncratically generated diversity structures from participants’ organizations. The study was done among two high-status groups by checking different types of discrimination such as discriminatory promotion practices, impact in hiring and wage discrimination. The impacts of all these experiments on organization diversity and employment discrimination law showed that under presented group suffers from low chances at a workplace (Kaiser et al., 2013).

There were also efforts of eliminating discrimination by the implementation of identity management strategies in the organization. According to Shih et al. (2013), workplace discrimination still occurs despite efforts to eliminate it. In their study, they introduce two classes of identity management generally taken by individuals to mitigate the negative consequences of discrimination. One of the identity management strategies was identity switching which involved deemphasizing target identities and remodelling it to a positively valued identity. Another strategy was identity redefinition. It consists of reassociation and regeneration of stereotypes (Bjørnstad et al., 2013). They stressed that when organization adopt a colour-blind approach, it becomes even more difficult for individuals to switch identity. This is because policies deemphasize differences in social identities. In contrast, it was seen that when organizations adopt the multicultural approach, it difficult for people to redefine their identity. When this multi-cultural approach is applied superficially, it invites difference and culturally dominant stereotypes are reinforced. So it will be beneficial if individual adopt their strategy to combat discrimination in a diverse setting. Organization can also play a role by taking steps to reduce the need for identity management strategies and facilitating identity management when necessary (Shih et al., 2013). 

Strategies for Managing Diverse Groups

So diversity in the workforce can be efficiently managed by restructuring the organization to achieve team success. In this section, we will see interactive effects of network structure and artistic composition on team potency. It is regarded that emergence of centralized network enhances team performance. The different kind of structural changes is dependent on team composition of an organization.  Instead of relying on previous perceptions, the network approach should be focussed on a patterned interaction between team members (Van et al., 2013). A well-structured network improves team performance as it facilitates adequate flow of resources (information, data, etc.) among team members. It creates a form of trust and cooperation in organizations where each member is willing to coordinate the actions of other team members (Erez et al., 2013). If any Company has some culturally diverse team, then more positive effects of network density are seen on team potency and team performance. In the case of an organization with different team members, a higher level of network centralization is necessary. This is an appropriate step required for optimal team performance. Therefore, the success of the team is dependent on the interrelation between network structure and team composition (Tröster et al., 2014).

It can finally be summarized that the essay was based on the review of different literature from the topic diversity and diversity management. In this essay, I have linked the first essay on the same subject. The second essay is a kind of extension of the first article where I had addressed the shortcomings of the first piece and gave relevant information to cover up what was lacking in the first essay. The first essay highlighted that organisation either totally benefit or lose from diversity in the workplace. But in my second through valid evidence from other new literature, I have tried to show that organisation benefit from diversity in the work place. The only important thing is that how effectively organization restructures themselves to manage a culturally diverse team. The essay first explained the general aspects of diversity and diversity management. The study showed that how different variables affected the financial performance of a company. It is seen that diversity is present in almost all workplace but it is the response that organisation take to manage a diverse group that brings profit for the company. Through the review of the different literature, I highlighted problems of discrimination due to the perception by advantaged group that there is no unfair attitude towards the underprivileged group. But another literature found solutions to those problems and explained how organisations take steps to dispel them by identity management and redefining. Based on another research the whole problem on diverse work team was summarised using effective solution based on active restructuring of the organization. So on the whole the essay identified problems in diverse workforce and also gave solutions to the problem.  

Reference

Bauman, C. W., Trawalter, S., & Unzueta, M. M. (2014). Diverse according to whom? Racial group membership and concerns about discrimination shape diversity judgments. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 0146167214543881.

Bjørnstad, A. L., Fostervold, K. I., & Post, P. U. (2013). Effects of cultural diversity on trust and its consequences for team processes and outcomes in ad hoc distributed teams. Scandinavian Journal of Organizational Psychology, 5(1).

Böhm, S. A., Dwertmann, D. J., Kunze, F., Michaelis, B., Parks, K. M., & McDonald, D. P. (2014). Expanding insights on the diversity climate–performance link: The role of workgroup discrimination and group size.Human Resource Management, 53(3), 379-402.

Erez, M., Lisak, A., Harush, R., Glikson, E., Nouri, R., & Shokef, E. (2013). Going global: Developing management students’ cultural intelligence and global identity in culturally diverse virtual teams. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 12(3), 330-355.

Ferraro, G., & Brody, E. K. (2015). Cultural Dimension of Global Business. Routledge.

Gong, Y., Kim, T. Y., Lee, D. R., & Zhu, J. (2013). A multilevel model of team goal orientation, information exchange, and creativity. Academy of Management Journal, 56(3), 827-851.

Kaiser, C. R., Major, B., Jurcevic, I., Dover, T. L., Brady, L. M., & Shapiro, J. R. (2013). Presumed fair: Ironic effects of organizational diversity structures.Journal of personality and social psychology, 104(3), 504.

Kirton, G., & Greene, A. M. (2015). The dynamics of managing diversity: A critical approach. Routledge.

Pieterse, A. N., Van Knippenberg, D., & Van Dierendonck, D. (2013). Cultural diversity and team performance: The role of team member goal orientation.Academy of Management Journal, 56(3), 782-804).

Pieterse, A. N., Van Knippenberg, D., & Van Dierendonck, D. (2013). Cultural diversity and team performance: The role of team member goal orientation.Academy of Management Journal, 56(3), 782-804.

Shih, M., Young, M. J., & Bucher, A. (2013). Working to reduce the effects of discrimination: Identity management strategies in organizations. American Psychologist, 68(3), 145.

Shin, S. J., Kim, T. Y., Lee, J. Y., & Bian, L. (2012). Cognitive team diversity and individual team member creativity: A cross-level interaction. Academy of Management Journal, 55(1), 197-212.)

Simons, T., Pelled, L. H., & Smith, K. A. (2010). Making use of difference: Diversity, debate, and decision comprehensiveness in top management teams. Academy of management journal, 42(6), 662-673).

Tröster, C., Mehra, A., & van Knippenberg, D. (2014). Structuring for team success: The interactive effects of network structure and cultural diversity on team potency and performance. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 124(2), 245-255.

Van Knippenberg, D., van Ginkel, W. P., & Homan, A. C. (2013). Diversity mindsets and the performance of diverse teams. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 121(2), 183-193.