Workplace Diversity

All CEOs, managers, supervisors, training professionals, and educators must be able to effectively recruit, train, manage, and promote a culturally diverse work force. Unfortunately, few of them have been adequately trained to do so. Effective management of diversity is good business. It takes effective communication, conflict resolution, and the creation of an inclusive organizational culture to succeed. This comprehensive book helps administrators better understand the problems they face--and how to deal with them--by dispelling the myths and facing the realities of cultural diversity.

Elsie Y. Cross draws on her own experiences as an African American woman to provide the practical assistance today's organizational leaders need. She demonstrates how oppression functions at the individual, group, and systems levels, and makes clear that if executives are to solve these problems in the workplace, they must confront their own emotional and psychological barriers first. Not a memoir but a knowledgeable, reasoned explication of a complex and complete system of organizational change, Cross' book is a major contribution to our understanding of gender and cultural problems, and a sign of hope that both can be solved.

In cross-cultural business settings, the author suggests that it is not enough to know that behavior differs across cultures, but also how differences in values drive these behavior. To truly understand the differences among cultures, one must understand their origins, how they emerged on the world stage, the various economic, political, physical, social, and religious forces that shaped them. This is a unique book in that it traces the antecedents of people's behavior and shows readers why cultures differ and includes suggestions for adjusting to these differences. Engrossing and revealing, Scarborough's book will be essential for corporate management and others involved in international commerce, but also for their counterparts in the public sector, who also understand why it is necessary to get along with people from other cultures in the pursuit of mutually beneficial goals.

Norma Riccucci considers the demographic changes to the public sector workforce and shows how government employers are managing the socially diverse populations that now fill public sector jobs.

The typical workplace is a hotbed of human relationships--of friendships, conflicts, feuds, alliances, partnerships, coexistence and cooperation. Here, problems are solved, progress is made, and rifts are mended because they need to be - because the work has to get done. And it has to get done among increasingly diverse groups of co-workers. At a time when communal ties in American society are increasingly frayed and segregation persists, the workplace is more than ever the site where Americans from different ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds meet and forge serviceable and sometimes lasting bonds. What do these highly structured workplace relationships mean for a society still divided by gender and race? Structure and rules are, in fact, central to the answer. Workplace interactions are constrained by economic power and necessity, and often by legal regulation. They exist far from the civic ideal of free and equal citizens voluntarily associating for shared ends. Yet it is the very involuntariness of these interactions that helps to make the often-troubled project of racial integration comparatively successful at work. People can be forced to get along-not without friction, but often with surprising success. This highly original exploration of the paradoxical nature--and the paramount importance--of workplace bonds concludes with concrete suggestions for how law can further realize the democratic possibilities of working together. In linking workplace integration and connectedness beyond work, Estlund suggests a novel and promising strategy for addressing the most profound challenges facing American society.

Billions of dollars have been spent on the wrong solution to the complex, sensitive and emotionally charged issue of discrimination and harassment in the workplace. Companies originally invested in diversity training in order to meet Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity requirements, to reduce litigation costs, and to buy social peace. The result was often more social conflict--divisiveness, hostility, backlash, and an increase in litigation. Hemphill and Haines offer a new, simple and effective solution that includes the need to: establish, publish and enforce a zero-tolerance policy against discrimination and harassment; develop standards which define unacceptable professional workplace behaviors; and provide the relationship skills training necessary for all employees to meet the company's behavioral standards. For all business executives, leaders, managers, supervisors, human resource specialists, trainers, consultants, entrepreneurs, and employees.

The editors and their contributors explore the world from a pluralistic perspective. There are several models proposed and used by authors that could serve as a framework for multicultural and diversity programs in both education and the workplace. The implementation of programs which target the workplace and specific strategies for success are identified. The international implications of globalization and the need for international as well as "at home" experiences are addressed by several authors. Regional research-based programs and strategies, in particular academic disciplines to promote pluralism, are explored from the university perspective. These models, strategies, and research findings should prove to be most useful for individuals seeking to implement programs to promote pluralism.

America's rapid and drastically changing demographics pose new challenges to society and particularly to the workplace. Taking as their theme that "The only antidote to stereotyping and discrimination is to know each other as individuals," the authors look carefully at the direction in which America is heading demographically and where it will be in the 21st century. They discuss what the workplace will be like and how it will be affected by the characteristics of the people who will comprise it. The essence of the problem, say the authors, is communication--the face-to-face interaction between people of different ethnicities, races, and genders. They may be speaking to each other but are not being heard. Exploring the relationship between culture, communication and management, this new research in management introduces and applies the theory of 'Reflexive Communication' and the microskills necessary for using it in day-to-day work situations. The authors lay out the patterns of culture-specific values and behaviors of the major demographic groups in the workplace--white males, women, African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. In each of these chapters the authors apply their theory and show step-by-step how individuals within each group can be accessed and trained by the precepts of 'Reflexive Communication'. The book concludes with a thoughtful examination of the future of diversity and diversity training in America and reasserts the need for people of differing cultures to find ways to work together, not only for their own personal benefit, but for the benefit of their workplaces and organizations.

This volume brings together top scholars in industrial and organizational psychology with social psychologists to explore the research and theory relating to various areas of workplace discrimination. Many of the contributors to this book participated in a conference on workplace discrimination held at Rice University in May 2000. The idea came from the realization that there had been no attempt to bring together the various literatures on the topic. Discrimination and issues of employment diversity are significant topics today in IO psychology, business, and human resource management. This edited volume examines the following components of this important discussion: *how to explain discrimination in organizations; *understanding discrimination against specific groups; and *implications for practical efforts to reduce discrimination. This book brings together, in one volume, a review of the research on discrimination based on race, age, sexual orientation, gender, physical appearance, disability, and personality. In addition, it explores the multilevel antecedents and potential bases for a general model of discrimination in the workplace. While social psychological research and theory have provided invaluable insights, an understanding of discrimination in the workplace and solutions will require incorporating factors at the organizational level in addition to factors at the individual and group levels. Although a definitive model is not reached, the aim of this text is to facilitate future research and theory.

Leadership is not something one does alone. It is an expression of collective, community action--unified action of leaders and followers who trust enough to jointly achieve mutual goals. The task of creating a culture conducive to interactive trust is perhaps the preeminent leadership task. This practical guide identifies the key elements leaders need to manipulate to create such a trust culture in any work environment. By learning to shape culture to meet changing needs--by learning to be continually responsive to the organization's vision as well as to the needs of a changing follower core--the leader can create the situation necessary for any successful organization, one where followers can trust others and feel free to work together to gain mutually desired goals.

This collection of readings provides the reader with a basic introduction to the topic and concepts of cultural diversity as it has come to characterize the culture of the United States. Particular attention is given to the practice of racial, ethnic, and special interest group characterizations. No other book is as complete in its coverage of the diverse cultural groupings that make up the American culture. This unique work serves as a first step in beginning the quest for greater understanding and appreciation of diversity.

Not since Edward Mason's classic book The Corporation in Modern Society appeared in 1959 has anyone compiled an authoritative overview of the American business firm. Such a survey is now clearly overdue, for in the last thirty years both the corporation and the business environment has changed radically. In The American Corporation Today, Carl Kaysen and other leading students of business and markets from around the country provide a much-needed analysis of American corporate life at the end of the century. Here is the American corporation from every angle--its postwar history, its relation to the law, its financing, its impact on technological innovation, its role as employer and as political force, and much more. The contributors--all of whom are recognized experts in their fields--not only tackle many of the same key areas that the contributors to Mason's classic study looked at, but they also illuminate issues that have only arisen in recent years. For instance, Raymond Vernon describes the increasing globalization of American business, where the net income from operations outside the U.S. is now nearly half of that from domestic operations (as opposed to one-tenth in the 1950s). James Q. Wilson traces how the corporation has become a full-time political actor, showing how it reinvented its political strategy and tactics in the 1960s in the face of a wave of new consumer, environmental, and worker health legislation. Gregory Acs and Eugene Steuerle show how the corporation promotes the commonweal, acting as agent for the employee in purchasing pension, health, and other welfare benefit plans, while Lester Thurow casts a critical eye at the decline of median real wages of American males over the last twenty years (never before have a majority of American workers suffered real wage reductions while the real per capita gross domestic product was increasing). In other pieces, corporate finance experts Charles Calomiris and Carlos Ramirez advocate removing legal constraints on financial institutions that prevent them from providing the full range of business financing from short-term debt to equity, Michael Useem looks at the rise of education and training as a vexing corporate issue, and Barbara Bergmann discusses the increasingly diverse work force, arguing that ending bias is in the corporation's best interest. And finally Neil Harris provides a fascinating discussion of architecture, exploring how companies have become the principle patrons of important architecture since the 1950s. Vital to everyone concerned with American big business today, this collection is sure to become the new standard upon which future studies of the corporation will be built.

Fine maintains that just to remain competitive as the U.S. workforce becomes culturally diverse, organizations must not only recognize the inherent multiculturalism within their walls, but must actively transform themselves into such organizations. Her book thus explains how cultural differences affect workplace behavior and provides ways for management to work with them, not against them. After reviewing the changing demographics of the workforce and discussing how present practices are exclusionary, Fine provides detailed descriptions of the values, norms, beliefs, and behaviors of various ethnic groups and women and the dysfunctional interactions among groups. Nine case studies document diversity initiatives in public, private, and not-for-profit organizations, and lead to numerous concrete ways to train employees in multicultural understanding and create policies and practices that acknowledge, value, and incorporate cultural differences into the organization itself. The result is an analytical, research-based discussion for scholars, researchers, and others in the academic community - and a practical guide to the complexities posed by multiculturalism for organization management at all levels in both the public and private sectors.