Appunti di diversity management

The New Realities of the Global Workforce

Changes in the global division of labor are blurring traditional geographic and corporate boundaries. Whether national or international, the confrontation of people with different cultures and characteristics in the workplace is an increasingly salient management concern. Trends in worker migration, occupational needs, and educational attainment, and their implications for increased diversity in global workplaces.

The context matters: Jobs that are low paying and low status in an industrialized country can be exported as higher paying and higher status to developing countries. Societies tend to racialize immigrants, describing them as "aliens" when they arrive, "minorities" if they settle.

The makeup of immigrants has drastically changed in recent years.

Although rapid population growth per se is not correlated with growth in the rate of emigration, simple population growth means that the same relative

flows contain more people.

Moreover, there is an association between development and emigration.

WORKER MIGRATION

International migrants tend to head for countries with which they share either an historic relationship (for examplecolonies) or geographic propinquity, for example EU. Most intra-EU worker migration mitigates the diversity challengebecause it replicates past flows that were geographically patterned by shared language, culture, or history. However, moreforeign-born EU workers come from non-EU countries than from within the community and represent a second wave ofdiversity concerns—culturally distant but with a partially shared past.

For all these reasons, the origins of workforce diversity in ED countries have tended to be relatively predictable.Increasing variety in both the sources and the destinations of worker migrants is making workforce diversity salient indeveloping countries, too.

The Gulf states (Oil exploitation) are a potentially

Interesting laboratory for studying workplace diversity because they combine both aspects of international worker migration—very low and very high skill levels—with ethnic and cultural differences. Overall, however, this region is considerably more favourable to immigrants than is Europe.

• Deteriorating economic conditions that began with 2008 financial crisis caused many economic migrants to return home.

OCCUPATIONAL DIVERSITY

The occupational patterning of migrants is also predictable in broad categories if both sides of the migration equation are considered. On the one hand, migrants works move primarily in search of higher income. Less obviously their opportunities and their place in the Workforce are determined by the evolution of the receiving economy as well as by the capabilities they possess relative to workers in the host country.

• One clear trend in the industrial countries is toward dispersion across industrial sectors; another is an increasing share

Temporary and highly skilled workers play a significant role in the overall workforce diversity. There are two main trends contributing to this diversity:

• Diversity of contribution by immigrant workers, who fulfill seasonal demands, compensate for shortages of native workers, or provide special skills. Currently, there are two trends among immigrant workers:
1. In advanced economies that reward and subsidize high educational attainment, there is an increasing need for workers to perform unskilled tasks, especially service tasks that cannot be exported by national economies.
2. Highly skilled individuals from developing countries often migrate in search of better opportunities than what their home economies can offer. India is a notable example.
• Although highly skilled individuals also experience the natural reluctance to leave home and family, in some countries, government policy failures have encouraged a large number of skilled people to emigrate, including professors.

• Whether high- or low-skilled, large numbers of migrants work abroad for a limited period and then return home.
• When travel was costly and difficult, migrants settled in the new country for good, or at least until retirement, and stayed there even in the face of negative labor market developments. Now low-cost transportation and communication technology makes it possible for workers to call two places "home."

MIGRATION OF EMPLOYERS

• Mass migration of employers transnational corporations export capital to reduce their labor costs and, indirectly create new markets for their products. The resulting workplace can feature a cross-cultural confrontation of foreign management and domestic labor, sometimes complicated by immigration of skilled personnel from still other countries.
• Foreign direct investment (FDI)—the net amount of investment by nonresidents in enterprises in which nonresidents exercise significant management

control—is an imperfect but nonetheless useful measure of this change because it is directly tied to production.

• UNCTAD estimated that transnational corporations generated about 1/4 of global gross domestic product (GDP 2010).
• The growing share of direct foreign investment going to developing countries has received more attention in part because the diversity implications can be encouraging on the one hand, but troubling on the other.
• The role of labor cost shifts in the overall business equation, and relative wages shift, too.
• Investment can support developing economies by increasing access to technology, workforce quality, or export potential.

EDUCATIONAL TRENDS AND WORKFORCE DIVERSITY AND IMPLICATIONS FOR DIVERSITY OF GENDER, DISABILITY, AND SEXUAL ORIENTATION

PART 2 – SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES OF WORKFORCE DIVERSITY

DEFINING DIVERSITY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

PREJUDICE AND DISCRIMINATION

“Each one of us is different from the

other”: Those qualities included salient individual characteristics such as race, gender, age, sexual orientation, and disability but also high school they attended, their hair colour, and taste in clothing and foods.

It is important to note that there is a fundamental difference between attributes that make a person a unique human being and those that yield negative or positive consequences.

Workforce diversity is about belonging to groups that are visibly or invisibly different from whatever is considered “mainstream” in society.

Geographic region, gender, race, ethnicity, other characteristics thus define a person as belonging to a more-/less-favoured group and can have either beneficial or detrimental consequences for one’s job prospects→ group distinction categories

WORKFORCE DIVERSITY DEFINED

To U.S. corporations, diversity is mainly about race, ethnicity, gender, religion, physical disability, age, and sexual orientation. To Europeans, diversity is about

National cultures and languages are a reality with which people have always lived. A review of the business, organization, and HR literature produced three types of definitions of diversity:

1. Narrow category-based definitions (e.g., gender, racial, or ethnic differences)
2. Broad category-based definitions (long list of categories such as variables as marital status & education: South Africa)
• Visible diversity refers to characteristics that are observable or readily detectable attributes such as race, gender
• Invisible diversity refers to underlying attributes such as religion, education, and tenure with the organization
3. Definitions based on a conceptual rule (e.g., variety of perspectives, differences in perceptions and actions)
• Differences in worldviews or subjective culture, resulting in potential behavioural differences among cultural groups
• Differences in identity among group members in relation to other groups

TOWARD A GLOBAL DEFINITION

People of that group, popular media images, cultural norms of tolerance, partial truths that we have picked from various other sources, as well as contextual variables that are influenced by current events.

A stereotype is a standardized, oversimplified mental picture that is held in common by members of a group.

• The result of an inferior cognitive process—that is, a process that utilizes overgeneralization or oversimplification
• Morally wrong because they categorized people who had no desire to be categorized

A prejudice is derived from the verb to prejudge and refers to a preconceived judgment or opinion held by members of a group. A prejudice is perceived as an irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, a group, a race, or their characteristics.

Geert Hofstede makes a distinction between two kinds of stereotypes.

• Heterostereotypes—perceptions about members of the other group (generally negative about other groups)

Autostereotypes—perceptions about one’s own groups (generally positive about one’s own group)

DEHUMANIZATION AND OPPRESSION

The most extreme psychological mechanism in viewing members of other groups as inferior is dehumanization and its behavioural manifestation is oppression: the unjust or cruel exercise of authority/power (slavery).

EMPLOYMENT-RELATED DISCRIMINATION. Discrimination:

(a) When individuals, institutions, or governments treat people differently because of personal characteristics

(b) When these actions have a negative impact on access to jobs, promotions, or compensation.

VIVE LA DIFFÉRENCE?

DIVERSITY AND EXCLUSION: A CRITICAL WORKFORCE PROILEM

The concept of inclusion-exclusion in the workplace refers to the individual’s sense of being a part of the organizational system in both the formal processes, such as access to information and decision-making channels, and the informal processes, such as “water cooler” and lunch meetings were

information and decisions informally take place. The concept of inclusion-exclusion, by contrast, is an indicator of the way employees experience and perceive their position in the organization relative to its "mainstream."