Diversity Management vs Equal Opportunity Essay Example

over those that do not.Second, Companies develop reputations as prospective employers for women and ethnic minorities. Those with the best reputations for managing diversity will win the competition for the best personnel. As the labor pool shrinks and changes composition, this edge will become increasingly important.

Third, for multicultural organizations, the insight and cultural sensitivity that members with roots in other countries bring to the marketing effort should improve that effort in important ways. The same rationale applies to marketing in subpopulations within domestic operations.Fourth, diversity of perspectives and less emphasis on conformity to norms of the past, which characterize the modern approach to management of diversity, should improve the level of creativity. Fifth, heterogeneity in decision-making and problem-solving groups potentially produces better choices through a wide range of perspectives and more critical analysis of issues. And sixth, an implication of the multicultural model for managing diversity is that the system will become less determinant, less standardized, and therefore more fluid.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). Managing these culturally diverse groups poses communicative challenges, however. The advantages of diversity take time and effort.

Specifically, when first formed, diverse groups are inferior to homogeneous groups in both performance and in managing the process of group interaction.However, over time, the diverse groups developed communicative strategies for managing diversity and eventually generated a wider range of alternatives and perspectives on a problem than homogeneous groups. Thus, in order to reap the benefits of diversity, group members should be made aware of their cultural differences and should share core organizational values. The need for heterogeneity, to promote, problem-solving and innovation, must be balanced with the need for organizational coherence and unity of action (Blake, 1991).

In actual fact, the challenges of managing and working in culturally diverse organizations are only beginning to be realized. There are three main challenges that organizations face as the workplace becomes diverse. The first of these is instituting diversity management programs in ways that avoid negative consequences that have been associated with these programs. The second two challenges are associated with gender diversity: the challenges of dealing with sexual harassment and organizational romance in the workplace (Hallock, 2001).