Implications of Workforce Diversity Essay

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Workforce Diversity

In quite a number of organizations there has been an increase in workforce diversity as compared to early times, this has been brought about by demographic factors such as immigration and economic factors including globalization (Christian et al., 2006). In many economies, the minority workforce is expected to rise as the years come and go. This expected shift in the workforce has brought a lot of interest in programs aimed at managing workforce diversity. The process of adopting such programs has been affected by various challenges especially regarding the change in organizational behavior. In order to manage workforce diversity effectively, it is vital that the distinction between functional and non-functional diversity is clearly identified. It should be understood that functional diversity has positive contribution to organizational behavior and effectiveness while non-functional diversity deter organizational performance, this is why it is important to understand the impact of diversity on organizational behavior.

Before discussing further on the impact of workforce diversity, it is significant that this term is defined. Hornby (2005) defines workforce as the "totality of the people working in an organization." This means that whenever workforce diversity is being discussed, both similarities and differences that there are among individuals must be taken into consideration. The other important factor is that workforce diversity encompasses all individuals that are part of the organization. Even though most of the times it is assumed that workforce diversity just considers demographic characteristics of individuals, this is far from the truth since all differences and similarities that exist among the workforce in an organization and which make each and every person unique is put into consideration (Kreitner and Kinichi, 2004; Thomas, 2006).

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Therefore those who are tasked to manage workforce diversity must deal with both similarities and differences of individuals at one go, such a manager must examine, determine and establish such features with the aim of integrating them.

Discussion

There are a number theories attempting to define workforce diversity, these theories have given rise to various and sometimes contradictory hypotheses with regard to the impact of diversity on group process and performance. Social categorization and similarity-attraction theory predict negative effects, including reduction in inter-group communication, lesser satisfaction and commitment, and rise in labor turnover. However, from the perspective of information and decision-making, there is a hypothesis of positive effects of diversity, the major reason is that there is an expectation that work-teams that are diverse should process information in a different manner, since team members are naturally expected to bring forth differing opinions. With this it is expected that the outcome is more creativity and increased performance. There are cases where conflicts are provoked by diversity in work-team composition and there are several findings that have tried to explain this. There has been a proposal that identification of individual group members with distinct groups may lead to interruption of group dynamics (Pelled et al., 1999). Self-categorization theory has also used this line of argument to show that 'out-group' members evoke….....

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