Managing Diversity

This was the first topic presented by students. Mauricio and Daniel explained the importance of diversity in a company and how it may affect the decision, atmosphere and status. They gave explanation about how diversity spreads through many layers of human complexity. Managers should view multiculturalism as an opportunity to maximize innovation and communication skills.

Managing diversity can increase the good performance of the staff of an organization, using the teamwork as an approach of support and creativity. It is important to deal with diversity, to be more productive, the entire individuals have different capacities that the company could use to improve its efficiency.

According to Chevrier, diversity cannot be an obstacle in the organization, the cooperation between companies is necessary to be more competitive. The alliances are a key part for businesses for that reason is important that the students be open-mind and expert in topics like managing conflicts, communication, accepting authority and cooperation.

Diversity benefits individuals, teams and organizations. In the individual increase employee self-awareness of biases, stereotypes and prejudices, enhance worker tolerance for people who are different, and form employees who are more flexible and able to deal with change. In the teams maximizes innovation and productivity on complex tasks, counter with different approaches to thinking and problem-solving, and improve communication skills and the ability to work productively in groups. In the organization augment flexibility, adaptability and pro-activity within the organization, access to a diverse range of markets, customers, suppliers and distributors, translating into bottom line results.


Questions:

Is diversity management at IBM a source of competitive advantage? Why?
Management diversity at IBM is a source of competitive advantage for several motives. To start, the approach permits IBM to have a broader perspective of customer, understanding the range of diversity and multicultural aspects that could be found within the market. This helps to make their products more accessible to new markets and legislations in order to generate more profit. Another important fact is that the strategy facilitates IBM to integrate all the employees and understand the different values that each culture brings to the company.
In a nutshell, having a diversity management contributes to understand and be prepared to compete in global markets due to the fact that societies are pretty different around the world, and be aware of diversity make easier to the company to adapt to new environments.
Do you think the IBM case reflects a strong organizational commitment to diversity?
IBM case reflects a strong organizational commitment to diversity because they are implementing a strategy that consists in creates eight tasks forces that people with different appearance and characteristics like: Whites, Asians, Blacks, handicaps, and people with different sexual orientation. The purpose of the tactic was to understand differences among groups in order to gain knowledge of it and make improvements. IBM strategy was successful because all the people were involved in it, from the highest levels to the operators. Thanks to this plan the number of executives with disabilities has increased more than three times.

References

Photo taken from http://www.gettyimages.com/, March 16th 2010

Sylvie, Chevrier. 2003. "Cross-cultural management in multinational project groups " Journal of World Business 38:141-149.