Managing Diversity

Diversity Perspectives

The discrimination-and-fairness perspective focuses an organization’s attention on providing equal opportunities in hiring and promotion, suppressing prejudicial attitudes, and eliminating discrimination in its practices. In this perspective, the organization consciously dismantles hurdles that might constrain its ability to attract a diverse workforce. But once in the organization, diverse hires are expected to assimilate into the dominant organizational culture. Therefore, the organization is more likely to adopt identity-blind practices that can be applied to all employees, rather than identity-conscious practices that focus on particular groups. For example, a discrimination-and-fairness organization might be more likely to develop a general mentoring program designed to develop junior staff and prepare them for promotion and less likely to develop a mentoring program targeting junior female staff with a focus on the unique problems experienced by female employees.

An access-and-legitimacy perspective is based on an organization’s recognition that its markets and customers are diverse. Therefore, it is beneficial for the organization to match that customer diversity with diversity in its workforce. Organizations adopting this perspective increase employee diversity but may concentrate on sales and service positions where diverse employees have direct contact with customer markets. As a result of this focus, an access-and-legitimacy consumer products organization might have high racial minority representation [Page 480]among its salespeople but might not experience parallel levels of diversity among middle and upper level management.

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