1. Cox: Challenge of Managing Diversity
What is diversity?
Disadvantages of Diversity
Advantages of Diversity
Why Diversity Efforts can Fail

2. What is Diversity? Diversity is
Differences in social & cultural group memberships among people in an employment, market or educational setting
Group memberships (e.g. gender, ethnicity, national origin, religion, etc) influence people’s major life experiences
Pie Chart Exercise
Backgrounds Exercise

3. Disadvantages of Diversity
Lowers Performance
Increase conflict
Lower commitment in work groups
Increase harassment and discrimination

4. Advantages of Diversity
Improves/increases
Problem solving
Creativity & innovation
Organizational flexibility
Quality of Human Resources
Marketing strategies

5. Advantages of Diversity in Groups
Improves Problem Solving
Approach problems from multiple perspectives
Increases critical analyses in decision making due to differences in opinion
Need to train diverse groups on how to best utilize their differences
Improves Creativity
Evidence: Innovation, performance in marketing tasks
How?

6. Advantages of Diversity in Groups
Organizational Flexibility
Diverse people have different ways to organizing and reacting and reacting to information
Women score higher on tolerance for ambiguity which is linked to cognitive complexity
Bilinguals show more cognitive flexibility
Having broad policies, reducing standardization improves fluidity allowing org to respond to external changes faster and cheaper

7. Advantages of Diversity in Groups
Quality of Human Resources
Diversifying pool of potential employees increases org performance
Marketing
Respond effectively to cultural differences in marketplace
Public relations adv of managing diversity well (e.g, IBM)
Understanding consumer behavior
Improves customer relations
But remember warning by Brief et al!

8. Why Diversity Efforts can Fail
Incorrect diagnosis of problem
Incorrect solution
Misunderstanding rate of return on diversity efforts

9. Why Diversity Efforts can Fail
Incorrect diagnosis of problem
Need to change org culture (of conformity) to capitalize on differences in world views
Increasing representation or increasing sensitivity of current employees not sufficient
Incorrect Solution
Alignment of all systems within organization needed
e.g., Recruiting and hiring not sufficient if barriers in mentoring, appraisal, compensation systems not removed

10. Why Diversity Efforts can Fail
Misunderstanding rate of return on diversity efforts
Institutionalizing diversity competency takes several years of intense effort
Most org expect results in a year, change focus and withdraw attention from diversity efforts

11. Cox: Challenge of Managing Diversity
What is diversity?
Disadvantages of Diversity
Advantages of Diversity
Why Diversity Efforts can Fail