A cultural perspective of diversity management implementation

Abstract: Diversity management is a relative new ideology that aims to lift up the underrepresented minority groups in organizations. During the past few years, an increasing number of firms are adopting this diversity paradigm as a part of their business strategy. However, there is a lack of a contextual aspect in this broad philosophy which makes it difficult to predict or understand employees’ emotions and attitudes when organizations adopt the diversity management in practice. Simultaneously, an implementation of diversity management is exercised within the context of an organizational culture. The aim of this paper is to give organizations that are planning to adopt diversity management insights in how these implications could appear in practice by analyzing the underlying cultural causes to these. The results have shown that organizations would benefit from having a deep understanding and map its organizational culture in their business context. This facilitates their prediction of the workers’ attitudes and emotions since many of these are hidden under the surface or not apparent to the people within the culture. A comprehensive understanding of Schein’s levels of culture and their stage of the group evolution provides them a starting-point in managing the employees where unlearning may be necessary.