Diversity research audit proposal for Procter & Gamble

P&g

To help establish Procter & Gamble's diversity initiative, it is important first to determine some metrics for measuring diversity, as a means of understanding where the company is today. As a starting point, it is important to remember that there are many different types of diversity and that not all diversity has been conclusively demonstrated to be positive for organizations. For example, Richard (2000) showed that in general racial diversity does add to firm value, but when HR takes it as a given that "diversity is good," and then does nothing else, this creates a situation where often the benefits of diversity fail to accrue (Robinson & Dechant, 1997). This is why a company needs to utilize a strategic approach to diversity management.

One way to conceptualize diversity is to split diversity between surface-level and deep-level. Remember than an underlying assumption of far too much diversity research is that phenotype differences between people equate to meaningful differences elsewhere. Such an assumption is ridiculous, unfounded, and basically racist. Thinking that all white people, or all Asian people, are basically the same and totally different from one another is definitely going to result in failure for your company. Deep-level diversity is where the meaningful diversity exists; phenotype diversity is a lazy proxy for this. Deep-level diversity refers to personalities, values, and attitudes, so the company's diversity measures should reflect these (Harrison, Price, Gavin and Florey, 2002).

There are often personality and psychological tests that can be used to understand such differences. Thus, measuring deep-level diversity is more difficult and expensive than measuring surface-level diversity. It is also more effective -- if you genuinely want to encourage the flow of unique ideas and perspectives, you need people who actually have them. Typically, this will require narrowing the census of internal diversity to higher management ranks, in order to contain costs. But there are fewer "diversity issues" at the lower levels anyway -- the so-called glass ceiling is a senior management phenomenon, and those are the people who are making decisions.

Managing deep-level diversity is actually quite a bit more difficult than managing a group of likeminded individuals who just happen to look different. Deep-level diversity leads to significant conflicts of ideas between members of an organization, owing to their vastly different perspectives. Phillips and Loyd (2006) did note, however, that surface-level diversity actual helps in conflict resolution among teams with high deep-level diversity because the group is perceived as being more open and receptive to new ideas, thereby encouraging all group members into more honest, open exchange of ideas.