Managing Diversity: Releasing Every Employee’s Potential

1. Managing Diversity: ReleasingEvery Employee’s Potential Chapter Two

2. Learning Objectives LO.1 Define diversity and review the four layers of diversity. LO.2 Explain the difference between affirmative action and managing diversity. LO.3 Explain why Alice Eagly and Linda Carli believe that a woman’s career is best viewed as traveling through a labyrinth. LO.4 Review the demographic trends pertaining to racial groups, educational mismatches, and an aging workforce.

3. Learning Objectives (cont.) LO.5 Highlight the managerial implications of increasing diversity in the workforce. LO.6 Describe the positive and negative effects of diversity by using social categorization theory and information/decision-making theory. LO.7 Identify the barriers and challenges to managing diversity. LO.8 Discuss the organizational practices used to effectively manage diversity as identified by R Roosevelt Thomas Jr.

4. Defining Diversity • Diversity • represents the multitude of individual differences and similarities that exist among people • pertains to the host of individual differences that make all of us unique and different from others

5. Layers of Diversity

6. Managing Diversity • Managing diversity • entails enabling people to perform up to their maximum potential • focuses on changing an organization’s culture and infrastructure such that people provide the highest productivity possible

7. Increasing Diversity in the Workforce • Workforce demographics • statistical profiles of the characteristics and composition of the adult working population, • enable managers to anticipate and adjust for surpluses or shortages of appropriately skilled individuals.

8. Glass Ceiling • Glass ceiling • represents an absolute barrier or solid roadblock that prevents women from advancing to higher-level positions

9. Percentage Change in US Population by Race Figure 2-2

10. Generational Differences

11. The Positive and Negative Effectsof Diverse Work Environments • Social categorization theory • holds that similarities and differences are used as a basis for categorizing self and others into groups, with ensuing categorizations distinguishing between one’s own in-group and one or more out-groups. • People tend to like and trust in-group members more than out-group members and generally favor in-groups over out-groups

12. The Positive and Negative Effectsof Diverse Work Environments • Information/decision-making theory • proposes that diverse groups should outperform homogenous groups.

13. Reconciling the Effects of Diverse Work Environments • Demographic fault line • “hypothetical dividing lines that may split a group into subgroups based on one or more attributes.” • Fault lines form when work-group members possess varying demographic characteristics and negative interpersonal processes occur when people align themselves based on salient fault lines or demographic characteristics.

14. A Process Model of Diversity

15. Diversity Climate • Diversity climate • Employees’ aggregate perceptions about an organization’s policies, practices, and procedures pertaining to diversity