Human Resource Management: Diversity Management Essay Example

with the most successful approach to diversity management will be more likely to attract the top talent, especially as the labor pool continues to change and become smaller.

Multicultural organizations benefit greatly from the insight and cultural sensitivity provided by members with diverse backgrounds. This enhances their marketing efforts and yields important improvements. The same applies to marketing within specific subpopulations in domestic operations. Furthermore, the modern approach to diversity management encourages diversity of perspectives and discourages conformity to past norms, leading to increased levels of creativity. Additionally, decision-making and problem-solving groups that encompass various heterogenous perspectives can lead to better choices, as they offer a wider range of viewpoints and enable more critical analysis of issues. Finally, the multicultural model for managing diversity suggests that the system will become less rigid and standardized, allowing for a more fluid and flexible structure.

The increased fluidity should create greater flexibility to react to environmental changes (Cox, 1991). Research and anecdotal evidence exist to support all of these competitive advantages. Several of these competitive advantages have particularly interesting implications in terms of communication within organizations. These are the advantages to be gained through increased creativity and enhanced problem-solving and decision-making, advantages that some communication theorists label as the cognitive consequences of diversity (Cox, 1991). Arguments for increased creativity and enhanced problem solving through diversity both rest on the contention that a diversity of employees will translate into a diversity of viewpoints. That is, men and women from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds will bring ideas to the organization that would not be available from a homogeneous workforce of white males. Communication theorists found that innovative companies employed more women

and people of color than less innovative companies. Innovative companies also worked to establish heterogeneous work teams in order to create a marketplace of ideas, recognizing that a multiplicity of points of view needs to be brought to bear on a problem (Blake, 1991).