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Globalization has changed the way of working in IT industry organizations in India (Panicker and Agrawal, 2020). The employment landscape has become extremely diversified with IT firms expanding their operations and forming alliances with the multinationals, making it crucial for the organizations to manage and leverage this workforce diversity to gain a competitive edge (Donnelly 2015, Kundu and Mor 2017). For this, it has become essential for the organizations to develop an inclusive and engaged work environment to retain the diverse and skilled workforce itself (Downey et al. 2015; Hwang and Hopkins 2015, Kundu and Mor 2017). This issue has been addressed in this research by studying the influence of perceived organizational diversity (POD) and inclusion on employee engagement, with their combined effects on turnover intention.
Earlier, the concept of diversity was studied from the perspective of demographic profiling only, followed by a gradual addition of the concepts like diversity climate, diversity practices, diversity management, perceived organizational diversity and diversity characteristics (Mor Barak and Cherin 1998; Pelled et al. 1999; Avery et al. 2007; April et al. 2012). In a significant study, Avery and McKay (2006) described the factors that employees think are relevant to determine the value that an organization places on managing diversity. These factors include unbiased recruiting by providing equal employment opportunity to potential employees, company’s efforts towards promoting policies and practices that strive to create diversity at workplace such as recruiting women, differently abled, providing maternity benefits, creating awareness about diversity issues and making team managers and the top management accountable for the successful implementation of the diversity related programs and initiatives. Consequently, the employees are expected to show higher engagement and lowered intention to withdraw from the firm (Cox 1994; Avery et al. 2007). In addition to assessing the perceived organizational value of diversity, it is important to affirm that employees feel accepted by their organization and teams (Downey et al. 2015, Puritty et al. 2017). The concept of inclusion comes in light here. It describes the extent to which employees feel a part of the organizational setting and of their respective work groups which would tend to affect their in-group membership and will help them to maintain positive relationship with other members of the group as well as outside the group leading to enhanced engagement at work (Downey et al. 2015, Peixoto et al. 2018). Hence, it becomes imperative for the employees to feel included and accepted in a diverse work environment which would consequently lead them to be more engaged at work. Initially, the term engagement came to light when Kahn (1990) proposed the concept of personal engagement or disengagement at work. Further, Schaufeli and Bakker (2004) described engagement as a positive mental state composed of vigor, dedication and absorption. Their study also highlighted the importance of engagement as a mediating variable in the relationship between turnover intention and job resources. Some studies have found work engagement to be a strong predictor of an employee’s intention to leave the organization (Jones and Harter, 2005; Saks, 2006; Halbesleben and Wheeler, 2008), however, in different geographies and industries. In addition, high turnover of employees is a major issue that is faced by IT industry today and needs to be addressed perpetually (Gupta and Singh 2020; Muthamilarasu and Selvarani 2020; Afroz and Haque 2021). This led the researcher to consider turnover intention as the final dependent variable for this study and examine its relationship with perceived organization diversity, inclusion and engagement by developing a path model.