Effective diversity in an organization is essential since it provides the organization with a pool of workforce which has a variety of skills, talents and the ideas. Enhancing diversity in an organization does not only shows the organization level of maturity but also shows that they are capable of managing discrimination and stereotyping, this is a boost on their side since it contributes to the creation of trust among the clients. Diversity in an organization can stem from different angles. The organization thus must be aware of every angle which diversity can possibly stem from. One of these angles is the Biographical characteristics. The biographical characteristics of diversity are those traits which can make an employee or workers misjudged, stereotyped or discriminated against other workers ( Manning & Bucher, 2013). The managers need to be very vigilant with this kind of traits to ensure that the workers are not subjected to any discrimination due to their biographical characteristics. What kind of biographical diversity which can make the employee be discriminated within an organization. The author of this article, therefore, presents some of the biographical traits of diversity which can help the management in ensuring that diversity is enhanced within the organization, and discrimination among such individuals is reduced.
It is worth noting that biographical traits of diversity can be acquired in the organization during the recruitment period and they are very critical in an organization since they determine how an individual will behave at work and how others will perceive him or her in an organization. Biographical traits in diversity are those personal characteristics of an employee that is objective and can be obtained from his or her records. They are also called the surface level traits of diversity. Following are some of the notable examples of the biographical traits of diversity within the organization.
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Age: an individual age bracket is very important in an organization. Age plays a significant role in work performance and issues of discrimination in an organization. Research has been conducted by many scholars to find a relationship between age and the work performance. The results show that old people are less likely to perform and more likely to have a high rate of absentees or quite their jobs. This is the sole reason why most organization does not include an employee or prefer old people to be part of their workforce. On the other hand, it has been reported time and again that most of the organization prefers less those individual who are fresh from the colleges or universities. Most of such individual of that age brackets are termed as inexperience, and only a few organization prefers hiring them. Most organization prefers hiring experienced staff who knows exactly what they are doing within the organization. The implication in this case is that, there will be more diversified experienced age group within the organizations. It also means that there will be less young people and less elderly individuals within the organization.
Gender: Sex traits are also biographical traits which determine diversity within an organization. Many studies have revealed beyond reasonable doubts that there are slight differences between male and female gender with regard to their performance within an organization. However, it is also worthy to note that due some reasons most organization prefers male gender than female. These reasons include work-life balance issues, stress handling, kid-related issues and many others. What is important to note at this point is that most organization prefers mixing the genders adequately so that they find a common or a normal kind of mixture which is very beneficial for the entire organization. Due to this aspect, most organizations are usually well diversified when it comes to genders.
Race and ethnicity: Race is the biographical heritage of people while ethnicity is cultural characteristics of an individual. These cultures tend to overlap with an individual’s race. It is worthy to note that race and ethnicity are critical and are determinant factors in organization production. Many scholars have revealed that most workers in an organization prefer to work closely with those people who belong to their race and ethical background. Many years ago, most companies had recognized that most employees like their workmate to come from a same cultural background, and employers made mistakes of hiring people from almost same cultural and racial background. This led to less diversity in many organizations. However, the trend has changed, currently; most employers prefer educating their employees on the benefits of having different races and ethnicity within an organization. This has led to more diversified racial workers in many organizations.
Disability: This is any workers who have either physical or mental issue which makes them different from other normal workers. It has been revealed by many studies that disable workers are less preferred by many companies. In fact, their numbers are very few in the corporate world. The rationale behind the isolation is that they have to be given more attention in the working environment and they also need a high rate of evaluations. Further, the disabled workers are more likely to encounter low performance within the working environments and thus make them less preferred.
Others: there are other biographical traits which also need to be given by an organization. These are inclusive of the individual tenure, an individual religion and also the sexual orientation or identity. These are also an important determinant of work performance, and they play a part in organization diversity.
In conclusion, biographical diversity traits are a critical determinant of who work in an organization. Most organization has particular kind of structure in their employment or workforce system which is closely tied to biographical diversity.
References
Manning, M. L., & Bucher, K. T. (2013). Classroom management: Models, applications, and cases . Pearson.
