MBA502 - A Professional Development Workshop on Diversity & Inclusion

This assignment solution presents a report on organizational diversity, focusing on its importance, benefits, and challenges. It includes an analysis of organizational culture, highlighting issues like discrimination based on physical features and religion. The report details activities conducted to understand diversity, including interviews with managers and exploration of interpersonal and intrapersonal inclusion. It also addresses the practical understanding of cultural diversity, examining both the positive and negative impacts of diversity in the workplace. The report concludes by emphasizing the necessity of diversity and suggesting ways to promote it through improved communication and addressing feelings of exclusion among employees. The activities includes study of diversity in class consisting of different nationalities and religions.

Running head: ORGANIZATIONAL DIVERSITY
Organizational diversity
Name of the student
Name of the university
Author note

2ORGANIZATIONAL DIVERSITY
Part one:
Organizational diversity:
The most important thing in an organization is the culture of that particular
organization. The diversity refers to the differences in various traits like age, gender, race,
marital status, ethnic origin, and religion and education background. There are many benefits
of the organizational diversity. It enables the organization to have different experiences and
different expertise. The people belonging to different cultural and social backgrounds can
give diverse ideas related to the development of the organization. It is beneficial for the
company to have diverse and global population (Peretz, Levi and Fried 2015). The
organization leads towards the attainment of the diverse market with the employees who can
speak well and who can relate from a cultural standpoint. Apart from the benefits there are
certain challenges of organizational diversity. There is a problem of language and
communication. The employees can come from diverse backgrounds. This is the reason they
can speak in their primary language. This can make the communication process difficult. This
can give rise to conflicts. The other thing that might happen is the increased amount of
employees might give rise to diverse opinions. This gives rise to conflicts which are difficult
to resolve. In a large population of employees it is difficult to understand the perspective of
different employees (Olsen and Martins 2016).
The organizational diversity is about providing equal opportunity to all the
employees. This might include the opportunity without any bias opinion. In many
organizations it has been observed that the organizations does not provide equal opportunities
to the males and the females. It is includes the unequal payment of the female employees and
the male employees. The organizations brought this under the strict law (Lyness et al. 2015).
It falls under the spirit of law. The potential of an employee cannot be judged based on the

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race, gender, religion, nationality, ethnicity and sexual orientation. There are many society
that makes differences between the female and the males and this is the reason the corporate
have the responsibility to follow the rule of eradicating the differences between the different
sexes. However it is not possible for the organization alone to eliminate the differences
between the different sexes. There is a relationship between the organization and the
environment. Both the environment and the society have a major role to play in the shaping
of the culture (Villotti et al. 2015). They both are responsible in resolving the cultural
conflicts and cultural biases. The organizational diversity forms a basic part in generating the
ground-breaking ideas and gripping the local markets. The organization ultimately is able to
make benefits from the diversity in terms of problem solving, greater innovation and
creativity and product development. It mainly consists of the standards and impartiality inside
the organization. A diverse workplace makes a working place better and makes the
environment comfortable and suitable for all to work. It encourages the act of inclusion of
someone or something in a group or set in total. It can be achieved successfully through the
components of cultural intelligence (Jansen, Otten and van der Zee 2015).
Part 2:
An activity was conducted in the form of research of the internal environment of the
organization that is related to the organizational culture of diversity. The activity would
include the identification of the issues that were related to the diversity. One of the major
diversity that was observed in the organizations was the deprivation of few members on the
basis of their physical features. It was observed that the individuals who had good physical
features were paid more attention to and they were given favours. This included their
complexion as well. The individuals who had fair complexion were given preference in case
of promotion and they were treated in a decent manner compared to the ones who had a
darker complexion. In many organization it was observed that the management distinguished

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among the employees on the basis of their religion. For example, in case the organization was
a Christian based organization, they gave preference to the Christian people while recruiting.
They gave preference on the Christian festivals and not on the other festivals.
The activity included the identification of the diversity identification. An interview
can be taken on the managers to analyse his understanding of all the layers of diversity with
the goals of using the similarities as well as the differences to align to the larger goal or the
mission of the organization. By analysing the interview of the manager the satisfaction factor
of the employees. One of the basic factor of organizational diversity is satisfaction of the
employees. This reminds of the aspect of inclusion. I thought of conducting a research on the
organizational environment and on their goals and diversity. I tried to understand the
complexities in identifying personalities based on diversity. This comprised of the ability of
the people to move in and out of their primary or secondary diversity dimensions. It was
evident when I observed many people who changed their gender and who chose to remain
like that. Some even changed their religion. In some organizations I noticed that due to this
the individuals were treated in a secluded manner and they were not given the feeling of
inclusion in a group.
The part of the activity includes visiting the dictionary and understanding the meaning
of interpersonal and intrapersonal inclusion. I went through the meanings of these two terms
and I explained it to the entire class the difference between the two terms. There is a
difference between the interpersonal inclusion and interpersonal inclusion. Social exclusion is
harmful for the environment. The human beings are social animals and this is the reason it is
extremely important for him to belong to one of the social group. The social exclusion
provokes a person to commit suicide. I went through many articles where I read about the
cases in which a person working in an organization faced the problem of being excluded and
therefor he found difficulty in working inside the organization. The meaning of intra is within

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and inter is between. People can detect social exclusion at any point of time and at any
situation.
The other activity that I performed was the practical understanding of the concepts of
cultural diversity. This was learned that this acted as both opportunity and challenge for the
managers. I took the interview of many managers where I got to know about the concepts of
negative impact as well as positive benefits of diversity in the workplace. Many managers
opined the fact that women in their organization are not given the roles of leaders as they
think that men in their organizations are more capable of performing the roles of a leader as it
is easier for males to move flexibly in many places and motivate the team members. They are
given this opportunity to the males on the basis of their gender. The opinion is not the same
everywhere in all the cases. The other managers had the opinion that the men and women can
work equally and any kind of discrimination should not be made on the basis of the same. I
tried to find out the ways to keep the equality in the workplace. The first and foremost action
under this is the identification of the barriers that prevent both women and men from
participating fully at work. The interesting fact that I came across while conducting the
research was increasing the number of dual-income families and single working mothers. I
observed that there were innumerable single mothers who was divorced and they earned as
single mothers. One of the essential finding of my research was that the leading companies
knew to maintain the diversity and they maintained the fact that diversity was not only about
the mix that included workforce but it is also about the likes and the dislikes of the company
and their business partners.
In the activity I tried to study the records of the company that had diverse workplace
where I could extract that the companies that practised diversity in their workplace
experienced an increase in the productivity. One of the employees of an organization
commented that diversion and inclusion brought about a positive environment in their

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workplace. The employees felt that they were important for the organization and as a result
their retention and productivity increased. There were many instances in the organization
when there was a major problem and it is because of the diverse culture and diverse
population the problem was solved in a short span of time. It is because of this factor that it
attracted the employees and their talents were retained. This increased the competitive edge
of an organization.
The last activity that I performed was to measure the diversity of the groups in my
own class. I made a study of the different nationality in which the different students belonged
to. They were from different nationality like they were Americans, Europeans, Australian,
Dutch and English. The age group of all the students were almost same. Most of them
belonged to 18 years. I studied the religion of the different members of my class members.
They belonged to different religions, maximum were Christian. The others belonged to
Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. The class consisted of both males and females. There was a
presence of diverse language among the students. Therefore from the activities I could
conclude that the diversity not only helped to build an organization but it helped in the
building of the environment and the society as well.
Part 3:
From the above activities I can therefore extract that in all respect diversity is
necessary process. The organizational culture is a part of organizational diversity. The
activities taught me promote the organizational diversity. This can be done through an
improved process of communication between the leaders and the employees. The managers
should spare some time to their employees and give priority to the worker who felt alienated.
There are some employees who feels excluded by the workplace diversity programs.
According to them these efforts are geared toward specific demographics like the females or

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non-white employees. The employees should be allowed to express their frustration and
speak those openly to the management. Therefore it can be mentioned that recruiting and
retention are the cornerstones of any workplace diversity strategy. Hence, it can be said that
organization diversity is important in all the establishments as well in the social environment.

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References
Jansen, W.S., Otten, S. and van der Zee, K.I., 2015. Being part of diversity: The effects of an
all-inclusive multicultural diversity approach on majority members’ perceived inclusion and
support for organizational diversity efforts. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 18(6),
pp.817-832.
Lyness, K.S., Ragins, B.R., Capman, J.F., Erkovan, H.S. and Millsap, R., 2015. Working on
Thin Ice? Investigation of Race, Organizational Diversity Context, and Job Insecurity.
In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2015, No. 1, p. 11664). Briarcliff Manor, NY
10510: Academy of Management.
Olsen, J.E. and Martins, L.L., 2016. Racioethnicity, community makeup, and potential
employees’ reactions to organizational diversity management approaches. Journal of Applied
Psychology, 101(5), p.657.
Peretz, H., Levi, A. and Fried, Y., 2015. Organizational diversity programs across cultures:
effects on absenteeism, turnover, performance and innovation. The International Journal of
Human Resource Management, 26(6), pp.875-903.
Villotti, P., Desmette, D., Stinglhamber, F. and Herman, G., 2015. The influence of
organizational diversity ideologies on work-related outcomes: differences between high-
status and low-status groups of workers. In 17th Conference of the European Association of
Work and Organizational Psychology (EAWOP).