The 'Image' of Diversity in Organisations

The 'Image' of Diversity in Organisations

The different attitudes of organisations towards diversity were identified by 4 different perspectives which include diversity blindness, diversity hostility, diversity naïveté and diversity integration. Diversity blindness refers to having no provision within the organisation and not addressing any problems or opportunities relating to diversity. Next, diversity hostility refers to the organisations attempting to actively suppress expressions of diversity and put its employees in their place. Diversity naïveté show the organisations view of diversity which positively encourages diversity awareness but is not able to cope with any problems which diversity causes. The last one, diversity integration, which is the ideal situation, addresses diversity in the organisation in a pragmatic way. It helps its employees to develop skills in diversity management and creates the preconditions needed for effective communication between the different groups in the workforce. (Moore, 1999) (browsers, 2022). My experience unfortunately including diversity blindness and hostility will elaborate more on the matter and will give examples.

My personal experience:

I've been working for a few months at a company which designs and sells women's jewellery. For the sake of the company, myself and any legal actions that can be taken against me I will leave out the name of the company and any other people involved. The company is not too big and we were 30 or so employees at the office. Considering the types of perspectives of the attitude towards diversity, I would say that company was the combination of diversity blindness and diversity hostility. First of all, all management is constructed of only males. The rest of the company is surprisingly mostly women which is very understandable as the company designs only women's jewellery. However, giving the feeling of a diverse company, seeing many women working at the company, nothing is being done to actually include women in decision making nor giving them any responsibility. So the approach is a showing on the outside the diverse team yet inside not really. Considering the hostility part, whenever women are trying to express feelings/ emotions/ ideas these are being brushed off very quickly and being decided by the men. This surprises me very much as you would think women's opinions would matter here a lot as the main customer segment are women but apparently it is not important for the company. This really conflicts with the company's image as they advertise in their website. They share many statements considering diversity, their vision in diversity and their percentages of among others, gender diversity. Initially, you would think the company is doing very well as their numbers are good. But they fail to mention that management is 100% male. Therefore, diversity in organisations is not always what it seems. Unfortunately, it's mostly worse than it seems. The 'image' organisations try to show us the consumers or business partners is solely to put the checkmark as to 'we did it as a company' to satisfy the society's current shift in diversity demand.

References:

- Browaeys, M. (2022, October 8). Understanding Cross-Cultural Management. PEARSON.