ORGANIZATIONAL DIVERSITY IN AT WORK | BENEFITS | CHALLENGES | LEADERSHIP


Secondary diversity traits include personality, family and community.
Organizational diversity in the workplace refers to the total makeup of the employee workforce and the amount of diversity included. Diversity refers to differences in various defining personal traits such as age, gender, race, marital status, ethnic origin, religion, education and many other secondary qualities.

Diversity Management
Closely related to organizational diversity is the prominent topic of diversity management. This refers to the human resource and management process of proactively planning to optimize benefits of diversity while down playing challenges. Traits of diversity management usually include sensitivity training and cultural awareness. Some companies include diversity training for all new employees as part of initial orientation and training. Highly diversified organizations often have ongoing diversity management programs.
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Benefits
Diversity can provided many benefits to organizations. A primary benefit is that a wide array of employee backgrounds means the organization as a whole has more experience and expertise coverage in critical areas that affect the company. Similarly, discussions typically produce a broader range of ideas when employees have diverse backgrounds. Additionally, companies that serve a diverse population or a global audience can more adequately serve that diverse market with employees that can speak the language and relate from a cultural standpoint.
Challenges
Language and communication barriers are among the greatest challenges to effectiveness in a diverse organization. With global diversity, employees may speak many different primary languages, making accurate communication difficult. Culturally, different perspectives on communication and different viewpoints on discussions can get in the way of efficient decisions and resolution of conflicts. Conflicts are not only more common in a diverse workplace, but they are often more difficult to resolve because employees have a more difficult time seeing each other's perspective.
Leadership
Along with providing training, company leaders need to set the tone for a highly functioning diverse workplace. This means setting the tone from the top by rewarding employees for involvement in diversity programs and supporting tolerance and acceptance of diversity. Some employers also participate in or financially support diversity awareness programs in the communities in which they operate. Finally, company leaders need to promote a non-discriminatory work environment.

Diversity in Organizations
Organizations have enormous power to focus efforts on collective goals, objectives, issues, problems, and results, if they so choose. It's the power of an organization's convergent effect -- people coming together in a planned way to accomplish something mutually beneficial for all involved. That's the theory of organization.

If organizations exist to unite diverse perspectives, capabilities, and talents in pursuit of common purposes and mutually beneficial results, why do they stifle diversity, seek sameness, discourage individuality, promote conformance, reward uniformity, and punish nonconformity? Because managing diversity is harder than managing uniformity -- managing diversity is more challenging, expensive, time consuming, demanding, stressful, and prone to fail.

Managing uniformity requires little more than an authoritarian hierarchy, strict enforcement of procedures and performance standards, command and control management styles, and a conforming workforce -- the allure of uniformity lies in its ease of administration, stability and predictability, efficiency of operations, low cost and on-budget performance, minimal volatility with few surprises and quickly conforming culture. However, an abundance of research and experience shows that organizations and work environments with high levels of required uniformity inevitably stifle creativity and innovation, retard initiative-taking, prevent widespread accountability for results, limit freedom to expand and create value, and weaken individual motivation, commitment and fulfillment. A truly diverse organization or work environment, on the other hand, unified through common vision and purpose is healthy, strong, innovative, dynamic, and capable of blending a multiplicity of perspectives, experiences, and abilities, and it is able to weather significant competitive challenges.

An abundance of diversity exists in nature until it's altered. An untouched acre of ground in Maine, for example, may contain up to 10,000 different varieties of tree and plant life. Such diversity is not only inspiring and beautiful, but also ecologically robust. If you were to level an unharmed acre of ground in Maine, removing all indigenous plant life and then letting it sit untouched, new growth would bring less than 10 percent of the former diversity in terms of tree and plant life. The trees and plants that first gain root in the newly leveled ground would dominate the space, preventing additional diversity from developing. Once removed, diversity rarely returns on its own. The uniformity mandate of the dominant species makes it impossible for diversity to flourish naturally. The lesson for modern organizations and their management teams is obvious: Diversity must be carefully and constantly nurtured, because creating an organization is a lot like leveling ground. Both activities create new space where the initial staffing or first species will attempt to dominate and control diversity. The very act of establishing and staffing an organization begins a process of limiting diversity, unless diversity is genuinely valued and vigilantly nurtured. Diversity by definition is the attempt to bring together competing interests into a single whole, Without constant nourishment, vibrant and productive diversity will eventually fade into ineffective, unfulfilling uniformity. Organizations with high levels of uniformity are ineffective and stagnant -- ultimately producing inbred corporate cultures that lack the new perspectives, pioneering capabilities and fresh ideas necessary to survive. That is the curse of uniformity.

Organizations and their management teams often define diversity too narrowly by tolerating, rather than embracing, government guidelines about inclusion of gender, racial, and sexual diversity in the workplace; focusing on the avoidance of legal risks, rather than the benefits of diversity; and doing the minimum necessary, rather than the maximum, to promote diversity. In the end, they promote uniformity rather than diversity, and understand only those customers who are most like their employees.
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