The Importance of Workforce Diversity
The workforce diversity consists of individuals with various human attributes or belonging to various cultural groupings. The individual's distinct background, opinions, and experiences result in a diversity of thought. In today's organizations, variety of thinking is what keeps the business moving; without it, an organization will fail. To attain excellent performance, leaders must always employ a diversity of thought strategy; that is, their workforce must include individuals who differ in a variety of dimensions, such as race, gender, lifestyle, and cultural background. The diversity of thought always assists in the provision of broader and deeper foundation of views, ideas, solutions to problems, and innovation and creativity in an organization. For instance, as per the result of one research, companies with the higher proportion of women and nonwhite male workforce usually rate higher on innovation and creativity than those with lower proportions. Moreover, another current study indicated that there is an increase in a team's collective intelligence when the percentage of women in the team is high. The diversity of thought also increases the institution's profit margins as the shared creativity and innovation lead to the enhanced productivity. It also helps a company in meeting the needs of diverse clients as culture plays a crucial role in the determination of goods and social services that the public use; by having minority groups, the organization can always understand the needs of all the clients from different backgrounds (Daft, 2015).
The Role of Leadership in Embracing Diversity
An organization can never have the diversity of thought if all the workforce composition is of the same gender, demographic, and ethnic background as they will always have uniformity in reasoning which narrows down ideas, views, and the handling of problems. Different leaders are usually at various phases of personal diversity consciousness and measures ranging from defense, minimizing differences, acceptance, adaptation, and integration (Daft, 2015). The example of leaders that people have worked for are always in the third stage of diversity awareness which is acceptance. Such leaders accept the cultural differences and also recognize other ways of thinking and doing things' validity. Moreover, they are always proactive and concede that through workforce diversity is not only for the good of the minority group but also for the organization's health.
Benefits of Embracing Workforce Diversity
All leaders should, by all means, recognize and accept the workforce diversity so as to achieve high performance, meet the diverse customers' needs, increase the economic competitiveness, and to have a broader foundation of views and ideas. The leaders should also try to be on stage five of the diversity awareness so as to be in a position of integrating the differences and able to adapt both behaviorally and cognitively.
References
Daft, R. L. (2015). THE LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCE (6th ed.). Stamford: Cengage Learning.
