Diversity in the Workplace: Impact on Behavior, Leadership, and Ethics

This essay examines the critical role of diversity within the workplace, emphasizing its significant impact on organizational behavior, leadership approaches, and ethical considerations. It highlights diversity as a key factor in organizational success, citing its ability to foster innovation, address challenges from various perspectives, and cultivate a skilled and experienced workforce. The essay acknowledges the potential barriers to diversity, such as age gaps, gender bias, and cultural differences, and stresses the importance of effective management, ethical practices, and leadership in overcoming these challenges. The leader's role in promoting a healthy organizational culture through training, awareness programs, and open-mindedness is also underscored. Furthermore, the essay emphasizes the necessity of ethical conduct in managing diversity, ensuring fair practices in recruitment, selection, and promotion, and ultimately positioning workplace diversity as a valuable asset for organizational success. References from various authors are included to support the arguments.

Organizational Behavior and Management 0
Title: Organizational Behavior and Management
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Organizational Behavior and Management 1
Diversity in the Workplace and Its Significance to Organizational Behavior,
Leadership, and Ethics
One of the main secrets of top organizations’ success is diversity. It provides an
opportunity to solve issues and challenges from different perspectives and come up with a better
solution. In addition, a diverse workforce is skilled, experienced, and talented in varying fields.
This makes approaches more innovative (Bond and Haynes, 2014). Although many leading
organizations succeed because of workplace diversity there are many others who fail because of
mismanagement of this diversity. A company that has a diverse workforce has people from
different ethnicities, religions, gender, age groups, skin color, and more. Sometimes, it is difficult
to coordinate and manage with other members of the organization. However, if the diversity is
managed properly by the leader along with proper ethics, it can be a real advantage.
Diversity in the workplace is a strong attribute of organizational behavior. Different
people have different perceptions and attitudes towards it. Having a diverse workforce and a
positive organizational culture is like having half the success achieved. There can be many
barriers when it comes to diversity, i.e. the age gap, gender bias, cultural differences, language
issues, and much more. When people cannot communicate properly, they will face issues in
coordinating as a team. A young employee will have a different outlook and approach towards
the challenges as compared to an elderly employee. In fact, gender bias is a very common
problem that is faced by almost all organizations. It affects organizational behavior to a great
extent and therefore, it is vital that the leader and the management take initiatives to promote a
healthy organizational culture and workplace diversity (Clarke, 2011). With the help of proper
training and development programs, these issues can be overcome. The employees and the leader

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should be open-minded towards it. The leader is an example for the rest of the team (like a father
is for a son), he should be very careful of his actions and words because employees consider
them as inspirations. People follow and imitate their leader and it is the duty of the leader to be
positive towards diversity and promote it in a healthy manner. It can be achieved by organizing
diversity he campaigns, awareness programs and more (Taulbert, 2016).
Ethics are vital for the success of any business. The suppliers, customers, middlemen,
almost everyone prefers to work with an organization that is ethical. There are times when
diversity often leads an organization to an astray path. With diversification, comes several
problems, gender discrimination being the major one. The organization should follow proper
ethics to solve these issues. Also, a fair chance should be offered concerning recruitment,
selection, promotion and more to each one of its employees, regardless of his age, sex, color,
ethnicity, religion, etc. Thus, workplace diversity is a boon if managed effectively and efficiently
by the leader and it also helps to keep an organization on the path of ethics (Martin, 2014).

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References
Bond, M. and Haynes, M. (2014). Workplace Diversity: A Social-Ecological Framework and
Policy Implications. Social Issues and Policy Review, 8(1), pp.167-201.
Clarke, C. (2011). A System Approach to Implementing Business Ethics in the Corporate
Workplace. Journal of Business Systems, Governance, and Ethics, 6(2).
Martin, G. (2014). The Effects Of Cultural Diversity In The Workplace. Journal of Diversity
Management (JDM), 9(2), p.89.
Taulbert, C. (2016). Workplace Challenges And Opportunities: Leading Outside The
Box. Leader to Leader, 2017(83), pp.47-52.