Introduction
According to the United Nations, Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Declaration on universal cultural diversity consented on the 2nd of November, 2001; Article 2 states that “in our increasingly diverse societies, it is essential to ensure harmonious interaction among people and groups with plural, varied and dynamic cultural identities as well as their willingness to live together” (Walden, 2011, p.1). Diversity management remains one of the critical roles of Human Resource Management (HRM) among organizations. Diversity management primarily involves organizations’ actions that aim to promote greater inclusion of employees from diverse backgrounds into an organization’s structure. The integration of employees within an organization has continuously enabled the management to harness its strategic goals and objectives to optimize their performance. Through HRM, diversity management in organizations is an ongoing process that ensures organizations create a wholesome or inclusive environment that is safe for all employees and customers. In management literature, the concept of diversity has continued to gain momentum, focusing on the minority ethnic groups in a country. For instance, in the United States of America (US), the concept of diversity in organizations came to the limelight with the primary goal of ensuring the minority groups had a more excellent representation in the labor market ( Mousa et al., 2020) . Hence, managing diversity is a voluntary positive practice adopted by organizations to ensure that they professionally deal with the dilemma and challenges of marginalization, exclusion, and under-representation of minority members. Thus, this study proposes that organizations considering the need to develop an inclusive organizational environment that reverences and appreciates individual differences and related intergroup dissimilarities remains a critical foundation for managing diversity policies. ‘
Importance of Diversity Management in Organizations
As an organizational culture, diversity management increases employee work performance. Employees working in organizations that have embraced cultural diversity tend to show a high commitment level to organization success. This means that an organizational culture such as diversity management directly impacts employee performance. For instance, Mousa et al. (2020) recognized a positive relationship between organizational culture and performance. In particular, in the medical field, De Moura et al. (2009) established that healthcare facility culture played an immense role in ensuring and sustaining the continuous provision of quality health services in nursing, patient attention, staff welfare, and job satisfaction, and staff turnover. Thus, due to the cultural dichotomy among employees in an organization, diversity management promotes productivity among organizations since it helps recognize and appreciate individual differences at the workplace ( Samuel & Odor, 2018). An organizational culture that seeks to recognize and value individual cultural differences among its employee workforce supports behavioral adjustment. All workers are encouraged to view issues from a different perspective. Besides, management of diversity challenges employees and managers to have a different reference frame when responding to various organizational issues. This move enhances collaboration between managers and employees, and this increases employee performance.
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Organizations that embrace diversity management increase their global competitive advantage. Any organization that desires to rise to international levels has to embrace cultural diversity among its management and employee workforce. Diversity creates a positive public image; this helps attract customers from different cultures as they feel associated with it. A business with a broad customer base drawn from different social and cultural backgrounds increases its financial performance. Samuel et al. (2018) propose that organizations that desire to continuously catch and attract international customers’ attention embrace diversity management as a formula for illustrating inclusiveness. Through the HRM paradigm, the management of diversity among employees and managers in an organization is positively related to higher returns on investments. When diversity management is well handled within organizations, it can form an excellent framework for synergistic and creative approaches for supporting an organization’s competitive advantage in the international market (Samuel et al., 2018). However, organizations have to ensure that they can competently convert the challenges that arise from diversity management into an enduring competitive edge.
The management of diversity among the organization is associated with innovation and creativity. A culturally diverse workforce comes with different experiences, thinking patterns, and a knew frame of knowledge critical in problem-solving and decision-making processes. Due to greater diversity, organizations have continuously established better means to solve their problems and make sustainable decisions that support the optimization of their financial performance ( Younis, 2019) . Besides, through innovation, organizations can improve their products and services to satisfy the diverse needs, tastes, and preferences of their customers. Due to innovation and creativity supported by diversity management, organizations can develop sustainable marketing strategies that will drive their sales, increase their market penetration potential and maintain a competitive advantage against other players in the market ( Younis, 2019) . There is a need for HRM to hire a culturally diverse team of employees with unique talents, skills, and abilities to reinforce an organization’s innovation and creativity potential to compete in global markets favorably. The HRM department needs to motivate innovation and creativity by attracting, training, selecting, assessing, and rewarding employees with exceptional dedication and commitment to organizational growth and success.
The management of diversity fosters organizational growth. As a strategic management component in the competitive market, diversity management is critical in supporting organizational growth in the fiercely global competitive marketplaces. As discussed earlier, organizations seek to achieve international relevance and competence and embrace authentic cultural diversity ( Urbancová et al., 2020). In today’s business environment, cultural diversity is a contagious time-sensitive imperative. As such, organizations have to make it as authentic as possible to resonate well with a bigger international market. As business organizations expand their services in various geographical locations, they need to understand the local communities’ culture and traditions in their target markets. The expansion of business activities into different areas creates some excellent investment opportunities for growth and advancement.
The Challenges of Managing Diversity in Organizations
Despite the many advantages that accrue with organizations that embrace the concept of diversity management in their operations, some significant challenges derail the full adoption of this progressive approach in the workplace. Firstly, the adoption of cultural diversity disrupts organizations’ status quo, especially among their employee workforce. In a general working environment, it is always a presupposition that people are comfortable working in an environment or a social setting with people who share common values, norms, perhaps cultures, and traditional practices. For this cadre of employees, introducing cultural diversity will inadvertently undermine their comfort level at work (Yadav & Lenka, 2020; Samuel et al., 2018 ). The introduction and subsequent introduction of multi-cultures in such an organization will disrupt the status quo and lead to low employee performance. Furthermore, there is a high chance that the organizational manager might not be confident and comfortable with working with a culturally diverse employee workforce. The challenge of organizations and existing employee workforce failing to understand the basic tenets of diversity management within their organizations on various aspects such as race, gender, and age. This influences a negative attitude towards embracing the whole concept of diversity management.
Multicultural teams in an organization may suffer from ineffective communication. A culturally diverse team of employees is drawn from members of different cultural practices and beliefs. As such, they are likely to experience challenges in both formal and informal communication (Samuel et al., 2018 ) . For instance, non-verbal cues in communication may have different meanings to different employees from various traditional and cultural backgrounds. In business organizations and HRM practice, communication is an integral aspect. It supports essential team players’ ability to plan, formulate, and implement strategic objectives that will spur the entity’s growth and expansion (Samuel et al., 2018 ) . Given this, multicultural teams are more dynamic than mono-cultural teams. There is a need for the HRM to exploit both the opportunities and challenges that come with multicultural teams, such as ineffective communication that might result in organizational conflict.
The biggest challenge facing organizations is the implementation of diversity and inclusion policies. When viewed on paper, diversity management and inclusion seem to be easy to implement. However, through the HRM department, the implementation of diversity management is an uphill task for organizations. For instance, organizations lack the prerequisite structures and strategies to enhance the easy implementation of diversity management and inclusion criteria ( Ng & Sears, 2020). For instance, organizations need to have structures that will address aspects such as individual characteristics such as the way the individual thinks, feels, and perceives issues within the organization. In perspective, this is a significant challenge for integrating the concept of diversity management on a macro-level within an organization since it influences how individuals behave in the organization.
The adoption and implementation of diversity among the organization are also associated with a paradox perspective. On a positive note, organizations adopt diversity management to transform their core components ( Nadiv & Kuna,2020). However, the transformation process is typically complex and relatively difficult to implement, leading to a paradox perspective. For instance, states that diversity policies among organizations are mainly assumptions that have no traditional approach to business processes. Due to this, organizations are forced to develop a diversity management congruence with predetermined results of well-planned change initiatives ( Nadiv et al., 2020). However, this perspective can be an inept strategy that recognizes the limited effectiveness and efficiency or rather the failure of diversity management approaches within organizations. During the implementation phase, diversity management has inherent contradictions that limit its efficacy as the sole strategy towards optimizing organizational performance to attain higher levels of customer satisfaction.
Factors to Consider in Adopting Diversity Management in Organization
Several factors influence the adoption and subsequent implementation of diversity management. Firstly, the type of the organization. In adopting diversity management, large corporations are at an advantage when compared to small and medium-sized entities. However, small and medium-sized organizations can survive in a competitive market minus a diverse workforce (Samuel et al., 2018). In this regard, as organizations grow in size and production capacity, they desire to align to diversity principles as a way of earning an excellent public image and trust. Besides, the location of the company can also affect the adoption of diversity management. Multinational companies will need to have a culturally diverse workforce such that they reflect the demographic outlook of their host countries (Samuel et al., 2018). As a matter of fact, most multinationals have diversity, a crucial part of their HRM hiring policy.
Furthermore, the existing culture and tradition of an organization influence its desire to adjust to diversity management. Organizational culture and tradition mean the fundamental rules, social norms, and policies that an organization has created, revealed, or developed in learning to handle its problems of adjusting to the external environment. Additionally, organizational culture involves the organization’s efforts to ensure everyone is fully involved in its internal functioning (Samuel et al., 2018). For example, an employee takes an active role in a group to which they belong, and that has been being judged as practical, relevant, and justifiable, to be shared with new members as the best way to see things (cited in Odor, 2018, p.31). Notably, some organizational cultures and traditions support the need to have diversity while others object and opt for a mono-cultural employee workforce.
Conclusion
Diversity management is essential for organizations that desire to grow and compete in the fierce international market. Notably, physical factors such as race, age, and gender are not the only defining cultural diversity factors in organizations. This study asserts that diversity management ensures that employees within an organization interact freely and help decision making and problem-solving. Diversity also encourages innovation and creativity, which reinforces an organization’s competitive edge in the market. However, diversity management’s main challenge is disrupting organizations’ status quo and a lack of practical structures for implementing diversity in its fullness. There is a need for continuous research in this area to ensure organizations have sufficient resources to implement and overcome diversity management challenges. Thus, managing diversity is a voluntary positive practice adopted by organizations to ensure that they professionally deal with the dilemma and challenges of marginalization, exclusion, and under-representation of minority members.
References
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