Managing Diversity

Chapter 4 discuss about diversity in workplace. The main point about this chapter are : what is diversity, why it’s important to have diversity, what are the challenges regarding diversity, and what are the benefits of having diversity in a workplace.

The first one is diversity, what is workforce diversity? It is defined as similarity or differences of people in an organization. The generally known diversity for a lot of people are the surface-level diversity where it is easy to perceive the difference between people like race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, and disability. But beyond that there is also deep-level diversity which in it includes about personality, value, and work preferences.

And why having a workforce diversity is really important. There are a lot of factors that contributes to this. For example having good management of diversity could reduce employee turnovers, absenteeism, and lawsuit case. All of those things could occurred if there are mismanagement of diversity and will prove costly to the company. Another thing than that is by having workforce of various backgrounds will help a company to achieve market, talent, and supply from all around the world that will help achieve new opportunities. Diversity will also give a new way of thinking and flexibility when it comes to facing a problem. That’s why having workforce diversity is important.

But then again even though there are a lot of benefits that a company will receive if they manage diversity correctly. There are still challenges from various things. The challenges that I mentioned for instance are people still have prejudice or stereotypes about a certain person. This stereotypes for examples are disability, religion, and gender. For example if a person have disability, company will hesitate to hire them because they are afraid that it will be more costly and they won’t be able to perform as normal people do. This clearly not true because like improvements in technology have made people in disability in level playing ground. Then there is also gender bias where a CEO of a company is still dominated by males because males are perceive as a better leader and only small percentages of females CEO. Then here is also discrimination regarding religion where for example a person isn’t allowed to wear hijab in workplace. All these things eventually hindered a company to improve and making a good work environment. And the things that I stated above aren’t the only things that still exist, there are also issues about LGBT, race, and ethnicity. It is very clear that there are still a lot of things to work on even though every single year improvement has been made in the form of regulation of laws(Equal Pay Act,Americans with Disabilities Act).

In conclusion I believe that because the world is changing rapidly and become more global as times goes on company also have to change their way of thinking and manage diversity in a better way. Because diversity will be inevitable to avoid as the world continues to grow into a global community. Company that doesn’t change and improve eventually will fall out of competition. Because of that it is better to start take advantage of diversity and see it as an advantage rather than a disadvantage. Which in turn will help company to grow, improve, and ultimately creating a good environment of work.

Reference: Management, 14th Edition, ISBN 978–0–13–452760–4 by Stephen P. Robbins and Mary Coulter, published by Pearson Education © 2018.