THE IMPACT OF WORKPLACE DIVERSITY ON ORGANISATIONS

ABSTRACT

The subject matter of this paper is workplace diversity. The study is conducted to explore how companies manage workforce diversity and its consequences to the company’s existence as well as examine how companies’ deal with challenges that comes with employees from diverse cultural backgrounds. The research therefore answers the question `Has workplace diversity contributed to organizational success. Because diversity covers a wide range of human attributes and qualities, The research is limited to the required tools for managing workplace diversity, advantages and disadvantages of managing a diverse workforce. Five companies in Fin-land and Ghana have been studied in order to acquire answers to the question that is being focused on.

To gather the required data for this thesis, the author has mostly used the current material that contains Human Resource Management studies. Qualitative research method has been used to gather and analyze the data on the companies. To answer the research question as well as obtain and practical and relevant information on each company, the author conducted an interview on three of the companies, and gathered information on the internet on two of the Companies.

The result shows that workplace diversity plays an effective role in some companies. However inadequate mentoring and guidance could cause a company low productivity. For this reason there must be regular improvement in ways to effectively manage a diverse workforce as the world keeps advancing.

In the conclusion, the findings of the thesis were indicated, which states that workplace diversity has contributed to more productivity but some factors such as differential treatment could hinder its successful implementation and hence company success. Big companies are more passionate about diversifying their workforce and see its implementation as a norm and continuously strive to improve diversity management, whereas small companies see it as a choice and evitable when they feel it a burden or cannot effectively manage it.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1          INTRODUCTION

            1.1       Background of the study

            1.2       Problems and Hypothesis

            1.3       Purpose of the Study

            1.4       Research Question of the Study

            1.5       Description of Material and Sources

            1.6       Research Methodology

            1.7       Limitations of the Study

2          THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

            2.1       Introduction

            2.2       Factors to Consider in adopting a diverse workforce

            2.3       Effective mentoring Program

            2.4       The concepts in diversity management

            2.5       Advantages and Disadvantages of Diversity management

                        2.5.1    Advantages

                        2.5.2    Disadvantages

            2.6       Required tools for managing a diverse workforce

            2.7       Cultural mentoring as a tool for managing workforce diversity

            2.8       Characteristics of a Good Mentor

                        2.8.1    Awareness of the outside world

                        2.8.2    Having A Global Vision

                        2.8.3    Processing a Positive Attitude

                        2.8.4    Having Networking Experience

                        2.8.5    Possessing some Professional characteristics

            2.9       Reasons for diversity management in organisations

                        2.9.1    Talent Shortage

                        2.9.2    Range of Consumer Need

                        2.9.3    Globalisation

            2.10 Barriers to effective diversity management

            2.11 Change Management

3  COMPANY CASES ON WORKPLACE DIVERSITY

3.1       An Organisation

3.2       Ford motor company

            3.2.1    Ford Motors History of Diversity

            3.2.2    Global Diversity Vision at Ford

            3.2.3    Global Diversity Challenges at Ford

            3.2.4    Diversity Management Tools at Ford

3.3       Coca-Cola Company

            3.3.1    Introduction

            3.3.2    Global Diversity Mission

            3.3.3    Diversity challenges at Coca-cola

            3.3.4    Successful Diversity implementation Measures

            3.3.5    Diversity Education and Training

            3.3.6    Coca-Cola diversity management tools

3.4       Miljoy Group

3.5       Dabbousi International Company Limited

3.6       Dastia Siivous Oy

4  LITERATURE REVIEW

4.1       Concerns about Reliability

4.2       Concerns about Validity

4.3       Concerns about Generalisability

5  DISCUSSION

5.1       Outcome of the Study

            5.1.1    Extent to Which Companies View Diversity

            5.1.2    Diversity at Big Companies, compared to Small ones

5.2       Conclusion and Recommendation

REFERENCES

APPENDIX

CHAPTER ONE

1           INTRODUCTION

Diversity can generally be defined as recognising, understanding and accepting individual differences irrespective of their race, gender, age, class, ethnicity, physical ability, race. Sexual orientation, spiritual practice and so on. Grobler (2002:46) also supports this view by adding that each individual is unique but also share any number of environmental or biological characteristics.

Diversity can be classified into two dimensions. The primary dimension such as age, gen-der, sexual orientation and so on, exhibits the main differences between various individu-als. These primary differences also has the most impact on initial encounters and can be easily noticed and serve as filters through which people view the world. The secondary dimensions such as religion, education, geographical location, income etc, are those quali-ties that are not noticeable in the first encounter and can even change throughout different encounters. These qualities are only noticed after some interactions occur between indi-viduals. (Ashton 2010). Globalization in this recent time has triggered more interaction amongst people from different cultures and backgrounds than before. People are now more open-minded in the marketplace worldwide with competition coming from almost every-where in the continent. Diversity can be a problem to an organisation but could also be a solution, It also comes with its disadvantages but also benefits and dangerous but also con-structive. The challenge then is to extract the very essence of diversity and tactically man-age it for the improvement of the people and the organization.

Most organizations in their own perspective, adopt diversity at their workplace or organi-sation to become more creative and open to change. Increasing and improving workplace diversity has become an important issue for management in the recent years due to the recognition of how the workplace is changing. Since managing diversity still remains a challenge in organisations, managers tend to learn managerial skills needed in a multicul-tural working environment and prepares themselves to teach others within their organiza-tions to value cultural differences and treat all employees with dignity. For some business leaders and managers point of view, diversity is a big challenge to them although it knows no organizational boundary and has no limitations.

1.1  Background of the study

During the 1960s and 1970s, the United States for the first time saw the need to promote workplace diversity. President John F. Kennedy in 1961 recognised a President's Commit-tee on Equal Employment Prospect with the goal of ending discrimination in employment by the government. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 went further, avoiding discrimination in any activity. The promotion of workplace diversity continued to go further, setting a policy to promote equal employment chances by creating the possibility for the program to con-tinue for a long period of time in any department. It turned out to be a turning point, be-cause it succeeded in avoiding the deliberation of diverse characteristics such as "nation-ality, human race, skin colour etc." to believing in the principle that to be fair to all, one needs to be committed to treating everyone equally.

In 1971, the Nixon Administration reviewed the policy in a way to ensure that positive action outline with a goal is set. Recent work has queried the meaning of diversity man-agement (for example, Jenner, 1994; Nkomo and Cox, 1996); its ability to lift morale and enhance productivity (for example, Thomas and Ely, 1996) and its underlying paradigms, assumptions and intentions. Litvin (1997) argued against the use of different kinds of per-sons (women, men, ethnic minorities or majorities, the aged etc) as repositories of differ-ence on the grounds that they are divisive, revitalization debate was conducted by Blom-maert and verschueren (1998) to argue that it is not about managing diversity as such, but that it is about managing the negative side effects of unaccepted diversity: the fight against racism and discrimination (blommaert and Verschueren, 1998, p. 14, emphasis in original). The various issues raised by these critiques are worrying when so many organisations seem intent on “diversity management”.

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