What is Difference of Advantages and Disadvantages of Diversity Management?
What is a Diversity Management? In recent years, diversity is increasingly perceived as an important issue in the context of business management. This is due to the increasing differences in the population, globalization process, increasing of international business and cross borders business dealing activities. In the business community, companies have also tend to pay more focus on diversity and look for ways to reap the opportunities offered by diversity as they acknowledge that diversity has the potential of yielding greater productivity and competitive advantages. Apparently, managing and valuing diversity is a key component of effective people management, which not only can improve workplace productivity, but also contribute significantly to the strategic objectives of human resource management.
Advantages of Diversity Management in Workplace
Diversity can be a sort of strategy which enables organization to gain competitive advantage in the market competitive landscape. Managing cultural diversity is one of the key factors differentiating a particular company at factors such as (1) efficient work practices or procedures, (2) technological innovation or change, (3) product or services related innovation and lastly, (4) client or consumers related services. What is Need? The Do and Don’t in Diversity Management!
However, there are more contributions of managing diversity to the strategic objectives of a company.
- Improved and enhanced competencies in terms of customer services. As a matter of fact, diverse workforce will often means diverse expertise, talent, experience and capabilities in the employees. If a manager understands the intricacies and complexity of how to manage diversity effective, he will be able to put the right person into the correct position, by minimizing his weaknesses while enhancing the particular employee’s strength. From this perspective, a diverse workforce enables a manager to choose the correct candidate for a particular position in the organization.
- Able to compile and improve the strength of customer intelligence. As we employ diverse workforce, we can indirectly tap into the knowledge and experience of these workforce. In the era of information, we understand that marketing intelligence or customer intelligence has becoming more and more important. Diversity in workforce in this picture can help a company to compile and collect more relevant and effective data on the market place.
- Ability to operate effectively as well as efficiently in a global context. As a well known fact, the entire world is a colorful depiction of diversity. Thus, to go global, a diverse workforce is some sort a basis requirement. We simply need the local experts to assist us in managing business units at foreign countries or simply to expand market share in the other countries. Thus, it is not hard for us to understand that a diverse workforce will enable a company to operate more effectively and efficiently.
- Able to produce more satisfied workforce, and thus leading to more productive workforce. If a company can manage diversity in a proper way, then the individual employee will no longer need to clone or purposely changed himself to adaption of the corporate culture. This can often leads to a more satisfied workforce. A more satisfied workforce, will in turn, leads to more productive workforce.
- Effective managing of diversity enables reduction in industrial disputes. Of course, proper management of diversity can also ensure less industrial dispute or court case arises from employees’ issues.
- Diverse workforce can lead to increased creativity and innovation. Diversity can produce synergy and creativity and innovative as well. A group of different people is better than a results produced by a single person. The combined efforts are always much outstanding.
- Having better chance to attract higher quality employees from a larger pool of employees. As a company prepare or has already adopted the mindset of having diversity is beneficial. Then the company automatically access to a diverse pool of human talents. Which means that the company can choose the employees from a larger pool of workforce. As now the choices are enlarged, then we can have access to better talents around the world. Or in other words, we can access to the world class talents around the globe.
Disadvantages of Diversity Management in Workplace
Poorly integrated heterogeneous groups can be as damaging to the organization as overly integrated homogeneous groups. Apparently, managing diversity is an art. While although the contribution to a company strategic management picture is bright, the execution is nothing easy. Besides, unfortunately, there are also evidences that diversity can bring disadvantages to companies as well.
For example, it is found that teams with diverse employees usually take longer to perform effectively. Besides, diversity also brings numerous communication problems as well as “faultiness” in informal group dynamics. At some serious cases, diversity can also be a source of conflict. That can cause issues such as reluctant to share information among workforce. Employee morale deterioration problems, and higher turnover due to degradation of job satisfaction.
Not only that, it is also mention that there can be various drawbacks due to implementation of diversity management program in the short term. Case Study of “Starbucks Entry to China” with Marketing Strategy.
For example, if handled insensitively, a diversity management program may invade employee privacy. Also, implementation of the diversity management program may be expensive in the short term. Apart from that, during the implementation process, deep seated prejudices within employees may be brought into the open, causing short-term tension. Particularly for a poorly handled program, conflicts and ill-feeling may be the end results for managers to handle.
