Developing Diversity Neutral Organizational Culture: A Study on Selected CPSEs of India

Developing Diversity Neutral Organizational Culture: A Study on Selected CPSEs of India

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-1933-1.ch082
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Abstract

Workplace diversity issues have now generated enormous activities in organizations. Diversity management practices are positively seen by the stakeholders, and also contribute to organizational value-stream. Worldwide through various government actions, discriminatory employment practices based on race, colour, religion, age, disability, gender, culture, and ethnicity have now been prohibited. With diverse workforces, culture of organization becomes complex. Hence organizations need to change to accommodate the principles of valuing diversity. Among others, this requires focus on changing employees' attitudes and eliminating discriminatory behaviours. Based on literature survey on organizational practices and diversity management practices of two public sector organizations, this book chapter discusses two core diversity issues, i.e., gender neutrality and cross-cultural diversity and then outlines the diversity management principles, which can benefit Indian organizations in long-term sustainability and growth.
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Different Approaches To Diversity

Diversity inclusion and competitive advantage of organizations could be linked by Fleury (1999), based on study of Brazilian organizations. Fleury defined diversity as mixture of people within the similar social system. Therefore diversity is an inclusive approach, encompassing race, gender, age, colour, physical disability, ethnicity, etc. (Kundu & Turan, 1999). With encouraging results for practicing diversity neutrality and embracing diversity inclusion, organizations across the world started aligning diversity issues with their strategy (Hayes & Mandez, 1997; Palich & Gomez, 1999) to get the benefit of efficiency and effectiveness in terms of achieving higher productivity and improving quality (Morrison, 1992) etc. With these gradually diversity management practices have been acknowledged as necessity in the corporate world. Cox (1993) defined diversity management as organizational systems and practices making use of potential advantages of diversity. To ensure diversity inclusion and neutrality, first thing that organizations need to do is following the principles of equal employment opportunities. For this organizations first document their policies on diversity issues, and then try to institutionalize the culture of diversity inclusion through series of interventions. Such interventions may be periodic diversity management audit, aligning adherence to diversity policies with performance management systems, periodic training reinforcements on diversity, etc. In organizations human resource management department plays the critical role in institutionalizing diversity management practices.

Diversity management has now become a business imperative for organizations. However, approaches to diversity management vary from organizations to organizations with respect to deficiency, discrimination, and differentiation (Glastra, 1996).

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