managing diversity

Running head : MANAGING DIVERSITY

Managing Diversity

Author 's name

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Managing Diversity

Introduction

Background

Organizations are facing the issue of diversity as a large number of employees belong to different cultural backgrounds . Hewlett-Packard is one of those organizations . People from different countries brought up in different cultures are employed in Hewlett-Packard . Due to the cultural differences , the corporate environment becomes contaminated Hewlett-Packard planned wisely to manage all the cultural conflicts by providing a uniform policy for the corporate culture

Problem

Hewlett-Packard believes in

workforce diversity so the firm , especially the human resource department , worked very hard to ensure that all the employees get chances to get promoted according to their abilities regardless of their gender and cultural backgrounds . In a major corporate division of Hewlett-Packard , one executive vice president is a woman and another executive vice president is an East Indian man

Purpose Statement

The purpose of the present essay is to provide information to the readers about the ways Hewlett-Packard used to manage its highly diverse workforce

Scope

All the core values and policies Hewlett-Packard used in the management of diversity are described in this essay , thus enabling the readers to know how a firm can be successful despite a highly diverse workforce This is limited to the success story of Hewlett-Packard only . The reasons behind the success of other firms might be different

Management of Diversity

The term managing diversity is nowadays becoming more important to organizations , not only because they are interested in diverse groups or they are up to date with the Equal Opportunities legislation and policies , but because they are facing important challenges related to the management and development within a diverse workforce in to survive in today 's global marketplace . Ten years ago , the majority of organizations did not think about diversity in the workplace with the intention of having benefit from it . Today , a vast percentage of organizations take advantage of diversity initiatives to enhance organizational performance and most important , they are committed to it (Sadri and Tran 2002

Managing a Multicultural Workforce

Sadri and Tran (2002 ) and Cox (2001 ) claim that a diverse workforce would bring new ways of groups working together in an effective way leading to increase morale between workers as well as profit and productivity . Tough , those positive outcomes take long time to manifest due to the need of becoming cohesive and find the structure that suits them on the way of doing things . However , once the members of the team learn and understand how to work together , the group becomes effective and even more than homogeneous groups (Schneider and Barsoux , 2003

Diverse workforce was seen before only as equal rights legislation and affirmative /positive action programs , where the former means that it is against the law to discriminate people and the latter means that organizations have to guarantee equal opportunities by taking positive steps . Nowadays , several studies have revealed some important outcomes that managing a diverse workforce brings , which gives competitive and business advantage...