Diversity What Is Diversity? The Term Diversity

Diversity

What is Diversity?

The term diversity refers to the combination of ethnicities, cultures, genders and ages within a large or small group of individuals.

List and discuss the six areas that Cox and Blake proposed as reasons for valuing diversity. What other reasons for valuing diversity can be added to this list?

Cost -- The failure to effectively diversify an organization's human resources almost always comes with substantial costs. Most often, minorities are overlooked in the workplace and become highly dissatisfied in their positions; thus causing high turnover rates.

Resource Acquisition -- Knowing that members of cultural minorities represent growing segments of the labor force, it is important for firms to effective consider and subsequently acquire these valuable resources.

Marketing -- An organization's capacity to appreciate its diverse workforce will directly carry over into marketing efforts to diverse consumer groups.

Creativity and Problem Solving -- People from different cultural backgrounds are able to provide alternative perspectives and thus increase creative potentials and problem solving outlets.

Systems Flexibility -- Qualities like bilingualism, biculturalism and the ability to effectively multi-task are all resources that highly diverse and flexible workforces can bring to the table.

Other factors that could have been added to Cox and Blake's list include: cooperative behaviors, stock prices and organizational performance.

What are some negative outcomes of increasing diversity and, given the inevitability of increasing diversity, what can organizations do to reduce these negative outcomes?

The most negative outcome that can be experienced in a workplace as a result of diversification is intolerance or even racism. Organizations can invest in cultural education and training programs for their staff to avoid this outcome.

Why is diversity important to everything?

Diversity is a key aspect of globalization. That is, through effective diversification, our world interacts more sinuously and efficiently.

What is the racial, ethnic, gender and age distribution of the people in each of these environments? What do you observe that you may not have noticed were you not investigating diversity in organizations?

Because I live in a highly urban environment I am constantly interacting with members of cultures other than my own. My job, school, neighborhood and nightlife are all highly culturally diverse environments and I truly relish them. However, while all of these areas are highly diverse in terms of culture and gender, the age range is not very wide. I live in a young community, predominantly comprised of young artists, musicians and students. Though I do experience a greater degree of age diversity in my workplace where I encounter people of every age, race and gender. The absence of age diversity in my neighborhood and the subsequent surge in age diversity in my workplace were two key things that I noticed during my intensive investigation.

What is structural inequality?