What is diversity?

1
Cox Challenge of Managing Diversity

• What is diversity?
• Disadvantages of Diversity
• Advantages of Diversity
• Why Diversity Efforts can Fail

2
What is Diversity?

• Diversity is
• Differences in social cultural group
  memberships among people in an employment, market
  or educational setting
• Group memberships (e.g. gender, ethnicity,
  national origin, religion, etc) influence
  peoples major life experiences
• Pie Chart Exercise
• Backgrounds Exercise

3
Disadvantages of Diversity

• Lowers Performance
• Increase conflict
• Lower commitment in work groups
• Increase harassment and discrimination

4
Advantages of Diversity

• Improves/increases
• Problem solving
• Creativity innovation
• Organizational flexibility
• Quality of Human Resources
• Marketing strategies

5
Advantages of Diversity in Groups

• Improves Problem Solving
• Approach problems from multiple perspectives
• Increases critical analyses in decision making
  due to differences in opinion
• Need to train diverse groups on how to best
  utilize their differences
• Improves Creativity
• Evidence Innovation, performance in marketing
  tasks
• How?

6
Advantages of Diversity in Groups

• Organizational Flexibility
• Diverse people have different ways to organizing
  and reacting and reacting to information
• Women score higher on tolerance for ambiguity
  which is linked to cognitive complexity
• Bilinguals show more cognitive flexibility
• Having broad policies, reducing standardization
  improves fluidity allowing org to respond to
  external changes faster and cheaper

7
Advantages of Diversity in Groups

• Quality of Human Resources
• Diversifying pool of potential employees
  increases org performance
• Marketing
• Respond effectively to cultural differences in
  marketplace
• Public relations adv of managing diversity well
  (e.g, IBM)
• Understanding consumer behavior
• Improves customer relations
• But remember warning by Brief et al!

8
Why Diversity Efforts can Fail

• Incorrect diagnosis of problem
• Incorrect solution
• Misunderstanding rate of return on diversity
  efforts

9
Why Diversity Efforts can Fail

• Incorrect diagnosis of problem
• Need to change org culture (of conformity) to
  capitalize on differences in world views
• Increasing representation or increasing
  sensitivity of current employees not sufficient
• Incorrect Solution
• Alignment of all systems within organization
  needed
• e.g., Recruiting and hiring not sufficient if
  barriers in mentoring, appraisal, compensation
  systems not removed

10
Why Diversity Efforts can Fail

• Misunderstanding rate of return on diversity
  efforts
• Institutionalizing diversity competency takes
  several years of intense effort
• Most org expect results in a year, change focus
  and withdraw attention from diversity efforts

11
Cox Challenge of Managing Diversity

• What is diversity?
• Disadvantages of Diversity
• Advantages of Diversity
• Why Diversity Efforts can Fail