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CHAPTER 4 Managing Diversity

CHALLENGES

After reading this chapter, you should be able to deal more effectively with the following challenges:

1 Understand the meaning of diversity.
2 Develop familiarity with major challenges in managing employee diversity.
3 Become aware of major elements of diversity in organizations.
4 Learn how to improve the management of diversity in organizations.
5 Learn how to avoid potential pitfalls in diversity management programs.

The second-grade school teacher posed a simple problem to the class: “There are four blackbirds sitting in a tree. You take a slingshot and shoot one of them. How many are left?”

“Three,” answered the seven-year-old European with certainty. “One subtracted from four leaves three.”

“Zero,” answered the seven-year-old African with equal certainty. “If you shoot one bird, the others will fly away.”

Source:© Maureen Ruddy Burkhart/Alamy.

Which child answered correctly? Clearly, the answer depends on your cultural point of view. For the first child, the birds in the problem represented a hypothetical situation that required a literal answer. For the second child, the birds in the problem had a relationship to known behavior that could be expected to occur.1

The Managerial Perspective

To succeed as a manager in the twenty-first century, you must work effectively with people who are different from you. The labor force is becoming more diverse in terms of ethnicity, race, sex, sexual orientation, disability, and other cultural factors. The managerial challenge is learning how to take advantage of this diversity while fostering cooperation and cohesiveness among dissimilar employees. The HR department can help you meet this challenge by developing training programs, offering assistance and advice, establishing fair selection procedures, and the like. But in the end, the line manager is the person who interacts face-to-face with diverse employees on a daily basis. In this chapter, we explore diversity issues that affect managers and the skills needed to make employee diversity a source of competitive advantage.

The blackbird story clearly illustrates one of the most important truths of HRM: People with different life experiences may interpret reality very differently. By the time people enter an organization, their cognitive structure—the way they perceive and respond to the world around them—has been largely determined. This cognitive structure is shaped both by unique personal experiences (with family, peers, school system) and by the socializing influences of the person’s culture, and it operates both at home and in the workplace.

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Table of Contents for CHAPTER 4 Managing Diversity

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Table of Contents for
CHAPTER 4 Managing Diversity