What Are The External Dimensions Of Diversity Management

Diversity is a wonderful asset to an organization and brings with it many benefits. Employees bring in their own personal experiences and knowledge to the team (Burns & Kerby, 2012). Having diverse teams allows for the possibility to fix a problem or perfect a process by using different employee’s experiences and past knowledge to find solutions. A diverse workforce can drive economic growth and capture a greater share of the consumer market (Burns & Kerby, 2012). With diversity as a core value, the recruitment pool is widened to find the most qualified candidate and reduces employee turnover as a result. An organization can be highly competitive with a diversity initiative by adapting to a changing environment (Burns & Kerby, 2012).

Diversity is vital in today's workplace. Having a diverse workforce opens up a wealth of possibilities and helps to encourage creativity and innovation.

Diversity is very important on a workplace because it create a respectful environment, reduce conflict, help business reputations, and avoid legal issues. This accepting and managing of these cultural differences has over the years become an important factor of organizational success.

Before we move on it is important to take the time and think what diversity means to your organization. How does your company define diversity? A simple definition of diversity is that every individual is unique, and has differences. These can be along the dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, mental abilities, religious beliefs, political beliefs, personality, cognitive style, or other ideologies. Your organization’s success and competitiveness may depend upon its ability to embrace diversity and realize the benefits.

The way in which an organization tackles diversity determines its negative or positive outcome. All the 5 companies agreed that diversity has contributed to their success. Some barriers were identified in managing diversity like the difficulties faced by women in managing the work and family, fear of discrimination, resistance to change, diversity is not seen as an organizational priority, resistance to change and unsupportive working environment for diverse employees. Diversity contributes to more productivity but if not properly managed could hinder success.

Organizations are made up of man & woman, many cultures & races, and multiple generations. Some of the organizations are also comprised of disable employees. This is what we called diversity. Diversity is something that has been around in the organizations for decades. Diversity in Collins Dictionary means, the state or quality of being different or varied and range of different things. It is synonyms to variety, mixture, range, and multiplicity. According to Queensborough Community College in its website define diversity as “Understanding that each individual is unique, and recognizing our individual differences. These can be along the dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, religious beliefs, political beliefs, or other ideologies.” Diversity is the mixture of people, culture, race, ethnicity, and more. Diversity can somehow affect the employees and can be challenges to the managers.

“Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without” _William Sloane Coffin Jr_ Over the last decade there has been massive rise in level of workplace diversity within all the organizations. As a result of it majority companies achieved higher performance and according to all the researchers, it shows heterogeneous groups are more inventive than homogenous groups. It is not only about those heterogeneous people bring various type of figures their different type of thinking benefit organizations to bring out their best outcomes throughout the process

Diversity is what makes people different, not just culturally but in human differences. Having a multitude of differences in the workforce gives an organization the ability to use many ideas to reach a common goal. A person could say that a diverse group of people together in one room can accomplish greater achievements than a room filled with the same types of individuals. Managers understand the concept of diversity, and how important diversity is to the success of a company’s ability to implement programs that continue to develop a harmonious and diverse workplace. The recognition that diversity is a reality in the workforce has generated an enormous amount of activity over the years among leaders in business, government, and civil

The general line of reasoning is that if we learn to incorporate each other’s diverse traits and characteristics in the workplace, we can then use these differences to foster an innovative environment, which will give the company a competitive advantage over the competitors that do not accept workforce diversity. According to the Allied Academies International Conference, “Diversity is rapidly becoming a common practice among companies due to the increasing number of minorities entering the job market today. As these groups become more prevalent throughout companies, upper-level employees are facing numerous challenges when determining what changes must take place to create a positive working environment for everyone. Management is responsible for the development and implementation of effective policies directly relating to diversity to ensure the acceptance of minorities into the workplace and to aid in minorities’ success through equal opportunities and treatment.” (Marcia L. James, 2001, Academy for Studies in International Business Proceedings)

Diversity is important to companies because with a diverse environment people can benefit and learn from others' ideas. Other reasons for the importance of diversity to many organizations are the recognition of differences as prerequisites for high performance and continuous improvement, enhancing the effectiveness and creativity of the organization, and valuing conflicts as opportunities for more effective decision-making and problem solving. Diversity has a major impact on our behaviors in the work place.

The business case for diversity is often expressed in terms of managing diversity (Urwin et al. 2013). It is defined as managing the diversity in the workforce to reduce or eradicate the discrimination amongst the employees in the workplace. From the business case perspective, the main focus will usually be on equality practices, or diverse workforce that will possibly benefit the organisation. Thus, from the business case perspective, organisations will recruit and select

With the changing demographics of the U.S. workforce (Ng & Burke, 2005) and the need for organizations to continually innovate their products and services to remain competitive, embracing diversity and the benefits its brings is going to be key to driving a successful organization

Organizations have been becoming increasingly diverse in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality. This diversity brings substantial potential benefits such as better decision making, greater creativity and innovation, and more successful marketing to different types of customers. But, increasing cultural differences within a workforce also bring potential costs in higher turnovers, interpersonal conflicts, and communicational breakdowns. The utilities of diversity training and the essential managerial skills required for effectively managing diversity will also be discussed.

I believe, that understanding and achieving diversity is the key to understanding the complex demands society and the marketplace place on businesses today. I also believe, when organizations leverage the contributions of their total workforce, they not only survive they succeed. So, how do we get there? Experience has shown, programs that work have taken time to develop and communicate the vision have the most success. I personally, as a manager and future business leader will be shaping messages and keeping diversity at the forefront of the minds of my peers and rank and file employees.

Managing diversity within organisation is about ‘recognising this range of differences in people and valuing people as individuals, respecting their differences and their differing needs. It is also about accommodating differences wherever possible so that an individual can play a full part in the working environment’ (Daniels and Macdonald, 2005)