Managing Diversity

This document explains the difference between 'race' and 'ethnicity' and discusses the issues at stake in the workplace when understanding and preferring one concept over the other. It highlights the impact of racial and ethnic diversity in organizations.

Running head: MANAGING DIVERSITY
MANAGING DIVERSITY
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Explain the difference between 'race' and 'ethnicity'.
The traditional definition between these two terms is connected to biological and
sociological factors respectively. The term ‘race’ can be said to refer a physical
characteristics of a person, like hair, skin and bone structure, eye color and others. The term
‘ethnicity’, on the other hand, refers to the cultural factors like regional culture, language,
nationality and ancestry. The term ‘race’ is connected with the concept of breaking down the
people into various groups or population on the basis of different sets of physical
characteristics. The racial categories occur from a joint genealogy due to the geographical
isolations. Though in modern world, this kind of isolations has been broken down and as a
result the racial groups have mixed with each other. On the other hand, ethnicity or an ethnic
group can be termed as a group of population whose members can identify with each other on
the ground of common cultural traditions or nationality. It is also defined in terms of the
shared genealogy (Ladson-Billings and Tate 2016).
Explain what issues are at stake in the workplace, if we understand/prefer
(and therefore act accordingly) one of these concepts, as opposed to the
other.
Racial diversity in the workplaces are pretty common in modern world. It may happen
at the time of recruitment orb hiring process, or in the tome of promotion of a people. It
possesses both positive and negative impacts on the people working in an organization.
Racial equality happens when the organizations give equal opportunities to all the employees
irrespective of the races. They ignore the racial physical traits of the employees within the
organization, thus maintaining a harmony within the employees. On the other hand, ethnical
conflict may arise in some of the organizations and the source of the conflict can be social,
political, religious or economic. Racial conflicts can come within the ethnical conflicts, and

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this can hamper the organizational culture as well as the growth of that organization. But in
modern world, racism issues are more happening in the organizations globally, which
actually giving rises to ethnic groups and creating a misbalance between the employer and the
employees. As a whole, the market share of the company will start to fall and the brand
image or goodwill of the company will be see that also (Taylor et al 2013).

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References
Ladson-Billings, G. and Tate, W.F., 2016. Toward a critical race theory of education.
In Critical race theory in education(pp. 10-31). Routledge.
Taylor, R.J., Chatters, L.M., Woodward, A.T. and Brown, E., 2013. Racial and ethnic
differences in extended family, friendship, fictive kin, and congregational informal support
networks. Family relations, 62(4), pp.609-624.