Information about Workplace Diversity

The "business case for diversity", theorizes that in a global marketplace, a company that employs a diverse workforce (both men and women, people of many generations, people from ethnically and racially diverse backgrounds etc.) is better able to understand the demographics of the marketplace it serves and is thus better equipped to thrive in that marketplace than a company that has a more limited range of employee demographics. An additional corollary suggests that a company that supports the diversity of its workforce can also improve employee satisfaction and retention.

This business case has been examined by a variety of organizational researchers, and no objective research support has been found for the "diversity business case". Also, US employers are prohibited by federal and state laws from giving race or ethnicity any consideration in hiring or assigning employees, no matter what the purported profit motive for doing so.

Another part of the business case is how well a company utilizes its various relevant diversities. This is often referred to as inclusion. If a workforce is diverse, but the employer takes little or no advantage of that breadth of that experience, then it cannot enjoy whatever benefits background diversity might offer.

Implementation

Diversity issues change over time, depending on local historical and dynamic conditions. Overt "diversity programs" are usually limited to large employers, government agencies and businesses facing rapid demographic changes in their local labor pool. The implementation of diversity is often limited to the Human resources department when there is also a good economic case for UK companies to use it as a tool to reach new market shares. See Diversity: an extra marketing tool

Ways of Categorizing Diversity

Harrison suggests that different kinds of diversity exist. Harrison aand others posit superficial or "surface-level" diversity (e.g. differences in gender, ethnicity, nationality) and "deep-level" diversity (e.g. differences in knowledge and differences in cultural values) (see Harrison et al, 1998, Harrison et al., 2002; Jehn et al 1999). Increasing amounts of interaction between individuals reduce the importance of superficial diversity and increase the importance of deep-level diversity for how a team functions. With regard to deep level diversity, informational diversity (differences in knowledge base) has been found to have positive impact on performance, but value diversity (differences in what individuals find important) has been found to have negative impact (Jehn et al 1999).

Stasser and his colleagues write that certain processes in groups help to get the benefits of informational diversity. First, it is essential that individuals with diverse sources of knowledge share their unique perspectives with others. This does not always occur as groups tend to preferably discuss not unique information, but common information, i.e. information held by multiple group members (Stasser et al 1992). To increase the odds that unique perspectives are shared it is important to create an awareness in the group about who has access to what knowledge (see work on transactive memory systems). Second, apart from information sharing it is important to foster debate: critically challenging and defending the unique perspectives of group members. With such deep information processing positive performance consequences are more likely to result (see Simons, Pelled et al 1999). Source: academic papers in Academy of Management Journal and Administrative Science Quarterly 1998-2005.

Criticism of The Business Case for Diversity

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There is no published research showing that surface-level appearance diversity improves workgroup or organizational perfromance. Most research shows surface diversity to be neutral or negative to performance.

Diversity and Legal Frameworks

US anti-discrimination laws prohibit employers giving any consideration to customers’ preferences for being served by employees of a given gender, ethnic group, or color. In general, the laws also prevent consideration based on religion, although the law allows major exceptions of this provision for religious organizations. Many countries are also introducing anti-discrimination laws (for example the DDA in the UK) forcing companies to be more aware of diversity.

See also

• Affirmative Action
• Diversity (politics)
• Reverse discrimination
• White privilege (sociology)

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