Organizational Behavior Essay: Workplace Diversity Impact Analysis

This essay delves into the critical concept of workplace diversity within organizational behavior. It highlights the importance of diversity in terms of employee backgrounds, skills, and cultures, particularly in multinational corporations. The essay emphasizes how embracing diversity fosters innovation, attracts talent, and creates a positive work environment. It also examines how organizations like Coca-Cola and Mastercard Malaysia have implemented diversity policies. The essay further analyzes the impact of personality traits and values on workplace diversity, referencing the Big-5 personality traits and Schwartz's theory of basic values. The author concludes by stressing the need for organizations to integrate diversity into their core values and design effective policies to achieve organizational goals. References to relevant academic papers and articles support the arguments presented.

Running head: ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
Organizational Behavior: Workplace Diversity
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author note:

1ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
Workplace diversity
Workplace diversity is a very important concept in the corporate world. This is one of the
major achievable objectives of the organizations. As there are many different types of tasks and
responsibilities in an organization, workplace diversity is encouraged by the management to
manage the workforce and the jobs in an efficient manner (Al-Jenaibi 2017). At the same time,
the increasing diversity among the employees in terms of education, skills and culture also
pushes the organizations to implement measures for workplace diversity.
According to Madsen and Nielsen (2017), workplace diversity is a very common feature
in the modern business world. This is more common in the multinational companies. Employees
come from various origin, gender, age, cultural and educational background, ethnicities and
nationalities and work together in these organizations to achieve the individual as well as
organizational goals and objectives. Hence, it is crucial for the companies to accept the
diversities and differences and provide these employees opportunities to mutually respect these
differences and work together for a better outcome. It also helps in reducing employee turnover.
Lambert (2016) stated that workplace diversity helps to bring innovations and that brings
business success. Due to diverse background, knowledge and skills of the employees, the
organizations are able to adapt to the dynamic business environment and deliver better value to
the customers. Thus, the diverse organizations are more efficient to attract more talents from
the market and gain a better market share.
The acceptance and implementation of the flexible diversity policies help the
organizations create a global mindset and a cultural fluency. As stated by Barak (2016),
diversity cannot be imposed later, rather the organizations need to integrate their attitude
towards workplace diversity and design the measures since the beginning to bring the best
results. Hence, diversity in workplace helps to build a positive and respectful work culture, which
helps the employees to stay motivated by keeping aside the differences and apprehensions and
working together to achieve a greater good. Shemla (2018) highlighted that the organizations
often try to align their organizational goals with diversity practices. The problem arises in how
the company designs its policies and implements those. To achieve workplace diversity, a
company should be clear about their goals and objectives regarding diversity; they should not
copy and paste from the theories, rather they should integrate the theories in their specific
attributes; good implementation policies should be designed and the organization must try to
motivate the employees.

2ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
This can be explained with the examples of Coca-Cola and MasterCard Malaysia. The
Coca-Cola Company has designed its Global Diversity Mission to reflect and respect the
diversities among their workforce. It is a global company that has units in almost all the
countries in the world. The company stated that they address the inclusion and fairness in all
facets of their business, that is, workplace, supply chain and distribution network, marketplace,
and community services (coca-colacompany.com 2018). Coca-Cola believes that diversity is an
integral part of their company and global business, which helped them to become a market
leader in the beverage industry across the world. They have launched 2020 Vision People
goals, that would help them to reduce differences in the workplace regarding age and gender
and achieve a long term sustainable growth by operating in a multicultural world. It also
launched a program for the managers to run an inclusion and diversity workshop during the
meetings to implement these.
Mastercard Malaysia is also famous for their workplace diversity policies. Grimes (2018)
says in the report that Mastercard has been recognized by DiversityInc, Malaysia for creating an
inclusive work culture that encourages decency and mutual respect. It was ranked 4th on the list
of top 50 most diverse companies. It was also ranked 8th for Diverse Recruitment, 11th for
Diversity Councils, 13th for Employee Resource Groups and top company for the LGBT
employees. Thus, the company has been successful in designing not only efficient diversity
policies that would encourage to reduce all types of differences among the workforce, but also
successfully implementing the policies and achieve the organizational goals.
Personality and values have a significant impact on the workplace diversity. Personality
traits and values of the employees determine the behavior of people in the workplace, and that
affects the organizational culture and attitude towards accepting diversity. The Big-5 personality
traits include Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism
(Parks-Leduc, Feldman and Bardi 2015). With these traits, values also play a significant role in
shaping the workplace diversity. Schwartz theory of basic values identifies 10 values and those
are, Power, Achievement, Hedonism, Stimulation, Self-direction, Universalism, Benevolence,
Tradition, Conformity and Security (Cieciuch et al. 2014). Recognizing these traits and values of
an individual helps the businesses to identify the potential future employees. Since, workplace
diversity requires the system to accept and respect the differences of the individuals and
integrate those to achieve the organizational goals, hence, personality and values of the
individuals are essential to implement the workplace diversity policies.

3ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
References
Al-Jenaibi, B., 2017. The scope and impact of workplace diversity in the United Arab Emirates–
A preliminary study. Geografia-Malaysian Journal of Society and Space, 8(1).
Barak, M.E.M., 2016. Managing diversity: Toward a globally inclusive workplace. Sage
Publications.
Cieciuch, J., Davidov, E., Vecchione, M. and Schwartz, S.H., 2014. A hierarchical structure of
basic human values in a third-order confirmatory factor analysis. Swiss Journal of Psychology.
coca-colacompany.com., 2018. Global Diversity Mission. [online]. Available at:
https://www.coca-colacompany.com/our-company/diversity/global-diversity-mission [Accessed
on 3rd Nov. 2018].
Grimes, M., 2018. Mastercard Recognized as a Leading Company for Inclusion and Diversity.
[online]. Available at: https://newsroom.mastercard.com/news-briefs/mastercard-recognized-as-
a-leading-company-for-inclusion-and-diversity/ [Accessed on 3rd Nov. 2018].
Lambert, J., 2016. Cultural diversity as a mechanism for innovation: Workplace diversity and the
absorptive capacity framework. Journal of Organizational Culture, Communications and
Conflict, 20(1), p.68.
Madsen, M.B. and Nielsen, V.L., 2017. Does Gender Diversity in the Workplace Affect Job
Satisfaction and Turnover Intentions?. International Public Management Review, 1(18), pp.77-
115.
Parks-Leduc, L., Feldman, G. and Bardi, A., 2015. Personality traits and personal values: A
meta-analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 19(1), pp.3-29.
Shemla, M., 2018. Why Workplace Diversity Is So Important, And Why It's So Hard To Achieve.
Forbes. [online]. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rsmdiscovery/2018/08/22/why-
workplace-diversity-is-so-important-and-why-its-so-hard-to-achieve/#524f55393096 [Accessed
on 3rd Nov. 2018].