Managing diversity

Management of diversity within organizations

An organization needs to manage its diversity, this refers that they must plan and implement organizational systems and practices to manage their people and assemble the best team, no matter the origin of the person for the sake of the company. In this way is possible to maximize the ability of all employees to contribute to the organizational goals and objectives.
Nowadays, managing diversity became an important challenge for companies’ managers and their organizations; the work environment is presented every day more varied, differences in age, religion, gender, race and cultures can be noticed. They will also differ in terms of lifestyle choice, perspectives, attitudes, value system, beliefs, behaviors, expectations, skills and experiences.

Ethical impacts of diversity within organizations

The ethical character of an organization is traced by their manager, respecting diversity suggests a consequential act of ethics regarding the diversity concept, this includes, gender, sexual tendency, culture, religion, beliefs, language, mental abilities, between others.
Ethics play an important and definitive role in organizations, having too much diversity inside an organization can bring positive or negative impacts, depending on the way this is managed, the company will create value trough this feature or will have a failure. It´s up to managers and human resources department to create value through diversity, even though is not that easy as it sound, it necessary to construct relationships based on ethics and respect for diversity.

Which is the importance of diversity?

It’s the opportunity to merge different ways of thinking, and benefit from them in a way that those different ways of thinking can solve the common problems, but also the most difficult ones.
“For over twenty years, researchers have precisely shown that management practices are embedded in national cultures and that the search for a universal effective way of management is meaningless (Hofstede,1980; Trompenaars, 1997)”(1)

Chevier on 2003, studied three different international project groups, so she could find how diversity is being managed, and after having the results a better strategy must arise.

Three dominant strategies used by the gropu leaders where perceived in these cases:
1. Drawing upon individual tolerance & self control: In this strategy, managers don’t pay attention to the cultural differences, he just expect self control, patient and some “obvious” special qualities of their team to work in a coordinated way.

2. Trial & error processes coupled with personals relationship: relationships results the key, communication and social approach, would make the work easier. Learning what partners like and dislikes can create a better environment in the future.

3. Setting up transnational cultures: managers implement international cultures as a resource that helps to join together the parts of the project, National habits are replaced by the habits directed by these cultures.
The article proposes a better a new strategy for managing diversity in the most proper way.
According to them there must be a cultural mediator in cross-cultural teams, the one that must be based on:

1. Understanding the context of the team members is key to success.

2.Interaction results don’t come naturally.


References

(1). Chevrier, Sylvie. 2003. Cross-cultural management in multinational project groups Journal of World Business 38:141-149.

Arango, Maria Isabel. Organisations and Culture. Class notes. 2009

Hopkins, Wille Edward. 1997. Ethical dimensions of diversity. Volumen 5 de Sage series in business ethics Business Ethics Series Sage Sourcebooks for the Human Services

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