Managing diversity is an intrinsic approach to human resource management that ignores the differences of race, culture, gender, or sexual orientation within an organisation to have the opportunity to maximise employee’s potential and enhance self-development and their contributions to the overall mission of the company. Diversity management is applied to fight against stereotypes, inaccurate perceptions and practicing discrimination to have positive outcomes of the objectives and minimize barriers of opinions, behavior and attitudes of employees. However, along with the positive impacts, managing diversity still exists the internal negative sides such as miscommunication, creation of barriers, and dysfunctional adaptation in the organisation.
Diversity appears to increase group conflict, especially in the early stages of a group’s tenure, which diminishes group morale and increases turnover rates. On a wilderness survival test, the groups performed equally well, but the members from the diverse groups were less satisfied with their groups, were less cohesive and had more conflict (Stephen P.Robbins & Timothy A.Judge, 2016). There are two types of group diversity matters: surface-level diversity and deep-level diversity, nevertheless, surface-level diversity affects more seriously than deep-level one.
Firstly, surface-level diversity is observable characteristics such as national orgin, race, gender, culture and so on. Showing favoritism for members of their own social category, obviously people have a tendency to work and communicate with those who are similar to them and often negatively evaluate those who are different from them, creating discrimination and self-segregation in group interaction. The occurrence of conflict due to surface-level diversity is called “relationship conflict”. For example, a Japanese employee and an American employee might disagree over the Battle of Pearl Harbor. Negative emotional reactions to relationship conflict is likely negatively to bias member’s perceptions of team outcomes and impacts on the organisation’s results such as increased turnover, reduced satisfaction, poor objective performance and low commitment.
Secondly, deep-level diversity is the differences of attitudes, values and opinions, which is likely to cause task-related conflicts. The dissimilarity of individual’s viewpoint compared with other group members happens due to past educational backgrounds and functional area of work experience, which can prevent members from discussing and unifying the group's effective objectives and solutions in their tasks. An example of deep-level diversity is the difference between students graduating from Viet Nam universities and students studying abroad in a workplace environment. Vietnamese people who graduated from oversea universities will be more dynamic and are likely to contribute creative ideas in their jobs while the others have a tendency to worry about the failure in novel perceptions. Moreover, task conflict can create an uncomfortable environment, decreasing an individual's satisfaction and their perceptions of teamwork.
One negative consequence of diversity is fault lines which split groups into two or more subgroups based on individual differences (Lau & Murnighan, 1998). For example, most people coming from the same nationality will expect to form a subgroup in a group, which is called demographic faultlines. This often created conflicts and reduced group performance. Subgroups may compete with each other, which takes time away from core tasks and harms group outcomes. Thatcher and Patel found that satisfaction with subgroups is generally high, but the overall group’s satisfaction is lower when fault lines are present.
Although it is enhanced that the diversity management maximise the organisational objectives, the conflict among employees about the different characteristics are being happened in workplace. The essay is written to hope that managers should heighten the importance of and construct suitable policies to limit the significant consequences of diversity because globalisation are occurred rapidly and the appearance of diversity is completely indispensable.
Reference
Taylor, Stephen (2019). Resourcing and Talent Management. Kogan Page Ltd.
Thatcher & Patel (2012). “Group Faultlines: A Review, Integration, and Guide to Future Research”, Journal of Management 38, 4, 969–1009
Karen A. Jehn. Managing Workteam Diversity, Conflict, And Productivity: A New Form Of Organizing In The Twenty-First Century Workplace. Journal of Labor and Employment Law, 12, 475-479.
Dr. Aruna Deshpande (2018), “Diversity Management and HR”, ( Mar 13, 2023), [ assessing at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323945462_Diversity_Management_and_HR ]