Cultural Diversity Management in Organizations

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: Diversity represents the ‘multitude of individual differences and similarities that exist between people’ (Treven & Treven, 2007, p.29). It came into play as an organizational concept three decades ago, in the 1980s in the US as an initiative to create a more positive business perspective and provide equal employment opportunities for various minority groups. The initiative that started as a mere political correctness and legal compliance issue later on evolved into a complex business-orientated strategy in the area of human resource management and development, organizational culture and leadership, named by Gilbert, Stead, and Ivancevich (1999) the new organizational paradigm. Changing demographics and recent societal changes like extensive immigration and consequent increase in international workforce alongside with current economic metatrends such as internationalisation and globalisation are causing more exposure to Diversity, both in daily and in business life. Managing Diversity is becoming a strategic focus area of management in organizations and a resource, which enables companies gain competitive advantage on the modern market through company’s most important asset - its people (Richard, 2000). Literature reviews (Cox & Blake, 1991) and numerous surveys (e.g. The Second European Diversity Survey, 2004; Survey on Diversity in Corporate Annual Reports of Stoxx 50 Companies, 2009) show that the topic of Diversity and, eminently, the issues of cultural diversity and ethnicity are currently gaining prominence amongst human resource (HR) professionals. Consequently, cultural diversity trainings (CDTs) are becoming salient, e.g. researchers report (Sweeney, 2002 as cited in Jackson, Joshi & Erhardt, 2003) that 67% of employers carry out ethnicity-related diversity trainings (DT). However, scholars (King, Dawson, Kravitz, & Gulick, 2010, p.1) point out that ‘prevalence of DT has not been matched by empirical research on its effectiveness’. The trend toward diversity trainings in organizations poses the question of their efficiency (Pendry, Driscoll, & Field, 2007; Roberson, Kulik, & Pepper, 2001), which can be operationalized as organizational business and individual-level outcomes, i.e. in form of psychological variables, relevant in that regard for both parties - employees and organizations. On the structural level of organizations Diversity is viewed as an organizational human resource development tool Diversity [...]