Diversity management was one of the most famous topics within the organization nowadays because effectively utilizing the organization’s human capital will be one of the most important issues affecting corporations in the future. The more diverse populations of the different countries around the world had caused the organizations to become more diverse as well (Fernandez 1993; Gilbert and Ivancevich 2000; Norton and Fox 1997). Diversity can be defined in two different way which is either narrow or broad. The narrow definitions of diversity were in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender (Kossek and Lobel 1996). The board's definition of diversity was in terms of age, religion, sexual orientation, language, lifestyle, beliefs, values, and economic status (Hayles and Russell 1997). Diversity management is relatively important to an organization to show its competitiveness. Diversity management consists of so many different issues, so it will take much more effort to implement it in the organization. There are some crucial factors that prevent diversity management and these factors are crucial to diversity management.
Our organizational structure nowadays was impacted by the size of the organization. This can we show that the size of the organization plays an important role in a good organization. Large organizations tend to have more work specialization, vertical levels, and rules. This important role of the size of the organization become one of the crucial factor preventing diversity management (Wentling, 2004). The complexity of their operations and their size for big organizations make it difficult to coordinate the overall process of diversity initiatives effectively. Corporations’ large number of units, branches, and locations are some of the barriers that do not allow diversity to be implemented easily. The size of organizations interferes with conveying the diversity message to many people in a limited amount of time.
Diversity management within the organization can range from visible demographics (e.g., gender, cultural background, ethnicity, and age) to more invisible traits, skills, and attitudes. (e.g., personality, educational background, and even political preference; Van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007). Within those diverse groups, these categorization processes can result in the formation of subgroups based on these differences (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). which is one of the crucial factors that prevent the formation of diversity management. The existence of such subgroups can instigate intergroup bias, a systemic tendency to evaluate one’s ingroup (or its members) more favorably than an outgroup (Hewstone, Rubin & Wills, 2002). The different subgroup categorizations thus arise different diversity problems, which can be explained by information elaboration. That is, groups that are characterized by interpersonal conflicts and distrust are less likely to experience effective information elaboration, and, conversely, groups that are characterized by group-level information elaboration are less likely to experience distrust and interpersonal conflicts. These ideas illustrate the important element surrounding group diversity and set the stage for a focus on moderating variables that can explain when diversity is more likely to stimulate negative or positive intragroup processes and outcomes. According to Sorainen (2007), some organizations’ diversity can lead to negative results because different subgroups (e.g. cultures different) can lead to different views of how time should be spent, regarding work, and gender roles. This may rise conflict within the organization and reduce work efficiency.
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Most organizations nowadays are facing a diversity management problem. There was a lot of different view on this issue. Some people said that diversity is promoted to combat different forms of discrimination on the one hand and to accommodate and integrate employees with different values and beliefs on the other hand. They are big argue on this that a high level of group diversity can lead to less integration and more differentiation (Martin 2002), less cohesiveness, less effective communication, increased anxiety, and greater discomfort for many members of a community (Fine and Handelsman 2010). This has become one of the crucial factors that prevent diversity management in organizations. This is because less integration will cause a big impact on the organization like low consensus and a lack of coherence needed for action and negative political dynamics. Less effective communication will increase conflict and can negatively influence an organization. The increased conflict was mainly due to a lack of communication in teams because employees that are less integrated may not understand or trust each other (Ancona & Caldwell,1992). Diversity and performance could be contradictory, the less integration and more differentiation in group diversity will have a negative impact on performance.
Management was all about people. We can realize that the organization has to be worked by a bunch of people as a whole otherwise it can’t work efficiently. This can show that one important piece of the puzzle in diversity management was people and diversity management can’t achieve its goal without people. This shows that people were one of the crucial factors that prevented diversity management. This is because the people inside the organization lack knowledge about diversity and did not understand the importance of diversity. People that lack knowledge about diversity can’t see its value and this makes them not have any expectations of it. This was difficult to penetrate the diversity management knowledge and practices into organizations themselves if they did not have any expectations of it. All of these have shown that the organization does not perceive diversity management to be an issue because they lack knowledge and they thought that was not important. Speculation regarding incentives to implement diversity management initiatives in organizations will, however, remain fruitless without empirical knowledge regarding the current state of organizational responses to changes in the workforce.
As the importance of diversity in the organizational context has increased manifold, most organizations would like to participate in a diversity management culture in a short time to become one of the pioneers or leaders in the market. The problem is that diversity management was not something that can be done in one week, month, or even year. It takes a lot of time and effort. This had show one of the crucial factors that prevent diversity management which is the diversity initiatives was very difficult to evaluate. This was because they are still a lot of workers that maybe could only know one language (e.g. their native language) and even some of the old workers have some stereotype barrier. Patrick (2010) found that diversity determines not only the effects of diversity within an organization but also the level of openness to dissimilarity characteristics among the organization’s members and work groups. Simlin (2006) found that as age increase, the perception of diversity openness decreases, and hence it is important to orient older employees also about the presence and need for diversity openness in organizations through training, workshops, group discussion, and so on.
In conclusion, all of these crucial factors above may be just the tip of the iceberg that prevents the implementation of diversity management in the organization. They are so many challenges and barriers that the organization has to face to achieve diversity. The management team and human resources have to develop some professionals to find strategies and mechanisms by identifying and understanding barriers that obstruct the success of diversity management. They also need to show their commitment to diversity by developing not only short-term but also long-term strategies or mechanisms to satisfy diversity issues in substantive ways. Nevertheless, all of this change and transformation within the organization is difficult and leadership at all levels must be involved in the process (Johnson & Senga 1996). The involvement of all workforce in the organization was necessary to find out all the barriers and obstacles that prevent them from developing the full potential of their entire workforce which they need in the worldwide competition.
References :
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1367886042000243781
- https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12465
- https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12465
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1331677X.2015.1100837
- doi:10.1177/2158244012444615
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09649429910301670
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