The Management of Organizational Diversity Essay

The Management of Organizational Diversity - Essay Example Diversity encompasses everyone. Diversity can be identified on various parameters like race, ethnicity, age, gender, physical ability, physical characteristics, income, education, parental status, marital status, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, personality types and geographic location. In the growing global scenario the diversity factor is on the increasing trend. This calls for more attention toward diversity management. There are laws like EEO, Equal Employment Opportunities that guarantee the right to everyone for employment regardless of their diversity. Diversity management improves on EEO but is not a replacement of EEO. There are certain constrains due to diversity like- the area of consideration gets limited, there could be lack of diversity in STEM position applicants. There could be negligible diversity at the top ranks. It may categorize people into certain positions. Recruiting tends to be normally done from the same source. Similarly, only one person or a group of persons coming from a set of backgrounds gets the opportunity to be groomed. It has been found that all individuals experience difficulty in interacting with colleagues, customers and others due to diversity in backgrounds like racial, gender or socio-economic. This often throws up cases of miscommunication but if they are not checked in time they could flare up into bigger problems. And there could be feelings like exclusion, mistreatment, no support or left-alone etc. that are not desirable for a healthy organization. One challenge is development of "like-me" syndrome. People coming from similar backgrounds tend to flock together. This created certain bias in the workplace and should be checked as early as possible. "[T]he "like me" syndrome can lead to a tendency to employee and work with people like oneself in terms of race, color, national origin, sex, religion, age, and disability." (EEOC, 1998: 27). This is a barrier for judging performances without any bias and also to get honest feedbacks. Similarly, when some groups are formed based on similarity, others are looked upon as outsiders. It has come up in researches that the outsiders do not get the same level of information, they are not included in decision making, they are given lesser opportunities to learn and perform. This gives rise to stereotyping where people intentionally or unintentionally form opinions about other groups. They also develop certain ideas regarding certain people. For example, women are too soft to become successful in administration or black people are not good employees Asian Americans are not to be accepted. The biggest challenge diversity poses is misunderstanding diverse non-verbal communications. For example a thumbs-up can be a positive sign in one culture but not so in another one and may become the cause of a rift. Sometimes the measures taken to encourage diversity by recruitment from all groups etc. can have a negative effect on the majority group as they