CHAPTER 3: DIVERSITY IN ORGANIZATIONS

DIVERSITY
- Canada was the first country in the world to adopt multiculturalism as an offcial policy, thereby
affirming the value and dignity of all citizens regardless of their ethinic origins, language, or
religious beliefs.
- Valuing differences helps to minimize discrimination, which occurs when job candidates or
employees experience differential treatment based on charateritics unrelated to work performance
such as gender, ethnicity, or religious beliefs.
 Increases an organization’s access to the widest possible pool of skills, abilities, and ideas.
 Help companies innovate more effectively, address diverse customer needs more appropriately,
and have other positive benefits.
 Differences among people can lead to miscommunication, misunderstanding and conflict.
I/ DIVERSITY IN THE CANADIAN CONTEXT: MULTICULTURALISM AS A GUIDING
PRINCIPLE AND FORMAL POLICY
- Multiculturalism Act include:
1. Formal statements of support for the maintenance of languages other than Canada’s two official
languages.
2. Mandating programs and practices that enhance community participation for all citizens.
3. Mandating programs and practices that enhance understanding and respect for diversity
4. Requiring the collection of statistical data measuring the outcomes of these initiatives.
- Multiculturalism as a policy ensures that all citizens can maintain their identities, acknowledge
and celebrate their ancestry, and still have a sense of belonging in Canada.
 It encourages harmony and cross-cultural understanding and supports efforts to integrate all
citizens and enable them to take an active part in Canada’s social, cultural, economic, and
political affairs
 Multiculturalism has led to a higher percentage of newcomers eventually becoming Canadian
citizens.
- Some critics claim that it encourages people to focus on their differences rather than their
similarities
- The latter critics state that in practice multiculturalism has focused on things like festivals while
failing to address underlying systemic barriers to true cross-cultural acceptance and inclusion.
II/ DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE WORKFORCE
- Today, that changes is well under way and progress continues, although things are certainly not
FULLY EQUAL YET.
- The substantial progress so far is increasingly reflected in the makeup of managerial and
professional jobs; women in particular have made progress moving into many (but not all) of
these prestigious roles.
 Labour market participation is also EQUALIZING OVER TIME.
- Gender-based employment discrimination has not been COMPLETELY ELIMINATED.
o The degree to which women are UNDERPAID and UNDERREPRESENTED in certain
types of occupations and how much progress they have made over the years.
o Women today are more likely to be employed full time, have an advanced education,
occupy positions of authority, and earn wages closer to those of men.
- While other groups continue to experience labour market DISADVANTAGES, their employment
rates indicate ongoing improvement to diversity levels in the workplace.
 This shift toward a diverse workforce means Canadian organizations need to make diversity
management a central component of their policies and practices.
 - The aging of the workforces is consistently one of the most significant concerns of HR managers,
along with the loss of skills resulting from the retirement of many baby boomers, increased
medical costs, and the need to enhance cross-cultural understanding.
- Other issues include increased global competition for talent and the complexity of meeting legal
HR requirements.
III/ LEVELS OF DIVERSITY
- Demographics mostly reflect SURFACE-LEVEL DIVERSITY, not thoughts and feelings, and
can lead employees to perceive one another through stereotypes and assumptions.
- Evidence has shown that as people get to know one another, they become less concerned about
demographic differences if they see themselves in terms of more important characteristics, such
as personality and values, the represent DEEP-LEVEL DIVERSITY.
- Since these types of differences tend to go unrecognized, deep-level diversity can be responsible
for persistent conflicts and misunderstandings
o But it can also lead to profoundly different modes of thought that can heighten creativity
and innovation in team settings.
- EX:
o Luis and Carol are managers in one company
o Luis is a young Mexican who emigrated to Canada three years ago
o Carol is an older and raised in rural Manitoba
 These coworkers may notice their surface-level differences in education, ethnicity, regional
background, and gender.
 As they get to know one another, they may find they are both deeply committed to their families,
have a common way of thinking about important work problems, like to work collaboratively,
and are interested in international assignments in the future.
o Steve is highly introverted, prefers to avoid risks, solicits the opinions of others before
making decisions, and likes the office quite.
o Dave is extroverted, risk-seeking, and assertive, and likes an active, energetic work
environment.
 Their surface-level similarity will not necessarily lead to positive interactions, because they have
fundamental, deep-level differences.
 It will be a challenge for them to collaborate regularly at work, and they’ll have to make some
compromises to get things done together.

How do Employees Differ? Biographical Characteristics

- BIOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS such as age, gender, ethnicity, disability, and immigration
status are some of the most obvious ways employees differ.
- However, despite the strengths diversity brings, variations in surface-level characteristics may
still be the basis for discrimination against classes of employees, so it is worth knowing how
closely related these surface-level characteristics actually are to important work outcomes.
I/ AGE
- The relationship between age and job performance is likely to be an issue of increasing
importance during the next decade for many reasons.
- Most workers today no longer have to retire at age 65, although there are some exceptions for
jobs in which extreme physical demands are a bona fide occupational requirement.
- Employers express mixed feelings about the older worker
o They see a number of positive qualities that may (but not all) older workers bring to their
jobs, such as experience, judgment, a strong work ethic, and commitment to quality.
o But older workers are also stereotyped as lacking flexibility and resisting new technology
 o When organizations are actively seeking individuals who are adaptable and open to
change, the perceived negatives associated with age hinder the initial hiring of older
workers.
- Based on studies of the age-turnover relationship, the older you get, the less likely you are to quit
your job.
- Most studies show that older employees have lower rates of avoidable absence versus younger
employees and equal rates of unavoidable absence, such as sickness absence.
- The older working population is healthier than you might expect.
o Older workers do NOT have more psychological problems or day-to-day physical health
problems than younger workers.
- Our final concern is the relationship between age and job satisfaction, where the evidence is
mixed
o Workers tend to be more satisfied with their job, report better relationships with
coworkers, and are more committed to their employing organizations.
o The indications are that age discrimination NEGATIVELY affects organizational culture
and overall company performance.
II/ GENDER
- If any important differences between men and women affect job performance.
- There are no consistent male-female differences in problem-solving ability analytical skills,
competitive drive, motivation, sociability, or learning ability.
- Stereotypic sex roles still have a DETRIMENTAL effect on both men and women
o Statistics Canada data from 2015 showed that the gender wage gap was 13% for full-time
workers. => This meant that for every $1 earned by a male, a female earned 87 cents.
- A recent study reported that once on the job, men and women may be offered a similar number of
developmental experiences, but females are less likely to be assigned challenging positions by
men, assignments that may help them achieve higher organizational positions.
- Research also suggests that women believe sex-based discrimination is more prevalent than do
male employees, and these beliefs are especially pronounced among women who work with a
large proportion of men
- Research has shown that workers who experience the worse form of overt discrimination, sexual
harassment, have higher levels of psychological stress, and these feelings in turn are related to
lower levels of organizational commitment and job satisfaction, and higher intentions to leave.
- Discrimination is still an issue, but there is a strong support among any organizations for a
diverse workforce.
III/ SEXUAL ORIENTATION AND GENDER IDENTITY
- The applications were identical, except that half mentioned the applicant’s involvement in gay
organizations during college and half did not
- The experiment found that, while much has changed, the full acceptance and accommodation of
gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees remains a work in progress.
- Federal law PROHIBITS discrimination against employees based on sexual orientation
o This protection extends to all aspects of employment, including the provision of benefits
to same sex-spouses and common-law partners.
o The unique workplace needs of transgendered individuals have also received increased
attention, especially as regards respectful pronoun usage and access to safe and
harassment-free washroom facilities.
 In concrete terms, simple ACCOMODATIONS like gender-neutral washrooms and change
rooms can make the workplace more welcoming for transgendered persons, contributing to a
culture of respect.
IV/ RACE, ETHNICITY AND IMMIGRATION STATUS
- We define RACE as the biological heritage people use to identify themselves.
- Their research shows that there is a continuum of genetic traits and you cannot identify
someone’s race just from their genes, suggesting race is a social not a biological construct.
- ETHNICITY: The additional set of cultural characteristics that often overlaps with race
o In addition to race and ethnicity, immigration status also impacts people’s individual
workplace experiences in ways that will be investigated shortly.
o Race and ethnicity have been studied as the relate to outcomes such as hiring, decisions,
performance evaluations, pay and experiences of workplace discrimination.
- Most research also shows that members of racial and ethnic minorities report HIGHER LEVELS
of discrimination and social exclusion in the workplace.
- Many Canadians have a poor understanding of immigration policy, and they frequently confuse
refugees and immigrants
o Refugees (also termed HUMANITARIAN-CLASS IMMIGRANTS) are brought into
Canada on compassionate grounds to satisfy obligations under the UN Convention for
Refugees, international legislation signed by the government in 1951.
o Most refugees accepted into Canada are families with young children who had been
living in desperate conditions in squalid refugee camps, sometimes enduring there for
more than a decade.
- Canada also gives preferential access to gay and lesbian refugees who face persecution and
torture in their home countries/refugee camps due to their sexual orientation.
- These people were required to be employable with skills needed in Canada or financially self-
sufficient entrepreneurs (term ECONOMIC-CLASS IMMIGRANTS), or have family members in
Canada who signed documents guaranteeing their financial support for a MINIMUM of 10 years
as a condition of entry (term FAMILY-CLASS IMMIGRANTS)
- They are frequently confused with refugees, though, a confusion often politically leveraged to
create the false impression that immigrants are a drain on society.

- The degree to which this is experienced is influenced by a concept known as

INTERSECTIONALITY, which the United Nations defines as an “attempt to capture the
consequences of the interaction between two or more forms of subordination… and address the
manner in which systems create inequalities that structure the relative position of persons”.
- The mental pictures (stereotypes) that you generated in your head are probably quite different
from the mental picture generated if you were to visualize a teenage single mother.
 - These discrepancies remained even when education and prior work experience were taken into
account, meaning that the different outcomes were not due to differences in skill and education
levels, but related to the intersection of race, ethnicity, and immigration status.

V/ CULTURE IDENTITY
- Cultural norms influence the workplace, sometimes resulting in clashes. Organizations must
ADAPT.
- Some cultures have a formalized attitude to hierarchy and power such that questioning one’s
leaders is seen as HIGHLY DISRESPECTFUL
o Organizational change initiatives that reply on collecting constructive criticism about
managerial practices from employees may pose a challenge in this environment.
 A company seeking to be sensitive to the culture identities of its employees should look beyond
accommodating its majority groups and instead create as much as an individualized approach to
practices and norms as possible.
VI/ DISABILITY
- Employer provided accommodations can assist those individuals in their efforts to MAXIMIZE
their participation.
 This change in perceptions of disability was part of a larger rights-based movement that included
calls for greater government oversight and enforcement of basic human rights.
- As perspectives on disability have evolved, numerous political resources have been devoted to
MAXIMIZING rates of labour force participation and the provision of employer sponsored
accommodations among workers with disabilities as one component of reaching equity goals.
 The Charter PROHIBITS discrimination based on disability; the latter two both prohibit
discrimination and mandate reasonable accommodation.
- Exceptions to the “duty to accommodate” under human rights and equity legislation include
situations in which doing so creates undue hardship or when BONA FIDE OCCUPATIONAL
REQUIREMENTS (BFOR) are unable to be fulfilled which means that the position cannot be
modified without creating genuine safety risk
- The case Alberta Dairy Pool vs the Alberta Human Rights Commission established the following
criteria for undue hardship used to determine if an employer is required to provide a specific
accommodation, which have since been used more broadly in courts across the country:
o Excessive expenses will incurred.
o It will disrupt existing collective agreements
o It will create morale problems with other employees
o The employer has highly interchangeable workforce/facilities
o The employer has a very small operation
o The employer has legitimate safety concerns.
- Common accommodations for mental, sensory, and psychiatric disabilities include being able to
work in a quiet, private workspace without distractions (for people with attention deficit
disorder), scheduling flexibility, social accommodation (creating understanding among coworkers
about communication-style differences associated with autism), and darkened rooms (as
sensitivity to florescent lighting is a common side effect of medications taken for mood disorders
and schizophrenia)
- Another review suggested workers with disabilities receive higher performance evaluations;
however, it also found that individuals with disabilities ten to encounter lower performance
expectations and are less likely to be hired.
 Workers with psychiatric disabilities in particular experience very high levels of discrimination
and are often stereotyped as unpredictable and violent
  This occurs despite the fact that violence is not typical of psychiatric conditions such as
depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia-contrary to the media-driven stereotype
reinforced on crime shows
 Psychiatric conditions are treatable and people who have them can be fully engaged, productive
workers.

VII/ RELIGION
- The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Human Rights Act PROHIBIT employers
from discriminating against employees on the basis of their religion
- Experiences range from having skills discounted and being denied interviews to social exclusion
and spurious safety complaints as a result of wearing HIJABS.
o Although all religious attire was included, the widespread public opinion was that this
represented an attack on the HIJABS and MUSLIM women in particular.
o This incident highlights the need for ongoing protection of religious freedoms in our
multicultural society.
- Religious individuals may also feel they have an obligation to express their beliefs in the
workplace.
VIII/ ABILITY
- Everyone has strengths and weaknesses that make him or her relatively superior or inferior to
others in performing certain tasks or activities.
- From management’s standpoint, the issue is NOT whether people differ in term of their abilities.
- They clearly do => The issue is using the acknowledge that people differ to increase the
likelihood an employee will perform her job well.
- ABILITY: An individual’s current capacity to perform the various tasks in a job. Overall abilities
are essentially made up of two sets of factors: intellectual and physical

Intellectual and Physical Abilities

- INTELLECTUAL ABILITIES: Those needed to perform mental activities – thinking, reasoning,
and problem solving.
- Smart people generally earn more money and attain higher levels of education
o They are also more likely to emerge as leaders of groups.
- IQ (Intelligence quotient) tests are designed to ascertain a person’s general intellectual abilities,
but the origins, influence factors, and testing of IQ are CONTROVERSIAL
- The seven most frequently cited dimensions making up intellectual abilities are number aptitude,
verbal comprehensive, perceptual speed, inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, spatial
visualization, and memory.
- Intelligence dimensions are positively related, so if you score HIGH on verbal comprehensive.
o However, the correlations are high enough that researchers also recognize a general
factor of intelligence, GENERAL MENTAL ABILITY (GMA)
- Jobs differ in the demands they make on intellectual abilities.
o The more complex a job is in terms of information-processing demands, the more general
intelligence and verbal abilities will be necessary to perform successfully.
- While intelligence is a big help in performing a job well, it does not make people happier or more
satisfied with their jobs.
- Research suggests that although intelligent people perform better and tend to have more
interesting jobs, they are also more critical when evaluating their job conditions.
 Smart people have it better, but they also expect more
I/ PHYSICAL ABILITIES
- Definition: Have been and will remain valuable.
 - High employee performance is likely to be achieved when mangement has ascertained the extent
to which a job requires each of the nine abilities and then ensures that employees in that job have
those abilities.
II/ DISABILITIES IN THE CONTEXT OF JOB SPECIFICATION
- It is discriminatory to make blanket assumptions about people on the basis of a disability.
- It is also possible to make accommodations for disabilities.
- Ensuring the accuracy of job descriptions and considering alternative ways to complete tasks can
go a long way toward removing inadvertent barriers for workers with disabilities.
III/ DISCRIMINATION
- Although diversity presents many opportunities for organizations, effective, diversity
management also means working to eliminate UNFAIR DISCRIMINATION.
- Noticing one employee is more qualified than another is necessary for making hiring decisions;
noticing an employee is taking on leadership responsibilities exceptionally well is necessary for
making promotion decisions.
- Rather than looking at individual characteristics, UNFAIR DISCRIMINATION assumes
everyone in a group in the same
o This discrimination is often very harmful to organizations and employees.
o It is also important to recognize that discrimination can often occur on a non-conscious
level, meaning that the people engaged in discriminatory behaviours may not be aware
that they are discriminating.
- Intentional or not, discrimination can lead to serious NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES for
employers, including reduced productivity, reductions in helpful behaviours, negative conflicts,
and increased turnover.
- Discrimination also leaves qualified job candidates out of initial hiring and promotions.
o Even if an employment discrimination lawsuit is never filed, a strong business case can
be made for aggressively working to eliminate unfair discrimination.
 Diversity is a broad term, and the phrase WORKPLACE DIVERSITY can refer to any
characteristic that makes people different from one another.
IV/ IMPLEMENTING DIVERSITY MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES
- DIVERSITY MANAGEMENT: Makes everyone more aware of and sensitive to the needs and
differences of others.
- Diversity is much more likely to be successful when we see it as everyone’s business than if we
believe it helps only certain groups of employees.

Implementing Diversity Management Strategies

I/ ATTRACTING, SELECTING, DEVELOPING, AND RETAINING DIVERSE EMPLOYEES.
- One method of enhancing workforce diversity is to target recruiting messages to specific
demographic groups underrepresented in the workforce.
o This means placing advertisements in publications geared toward specific demographic
groups; recruiting at colleges, universities, and other institutions with significant numbers
of underrepresented minorities; posting job ads in community centres and social venues
where underrepresented groups gather; and forming partnerships with associations like
the Justicia Project (supporting female lawyers) or Society of Women Engineers.
- Research has shown that women and minorities do have greater interest in employers that make
special efforts to highlight a commitment to diversity in their recruiting materials.
- Managers who hire need to value FAIRNESS and objective in selecting employees and focus on
the productive potential of new recruits.
o When managers use a well-defined protocol for assessing applicant talent and the
organization clearly prioritizes non-discrimination policies, qualifications become far
more important in determining who gets hired than demographic characteristics.
1. Make sure that job criteria are established using valid job analysis processes.
2. Confirm that interview questions and selection tests are free from subtle cultural or gender biases
3. Have multiple interviewers to minimize the impact of individual biases (both conscious and non-
conscious)
4. Ask all candidates exactly the same interview questions in the same order and have a
predetermined scoring sheet to assess their responses.
5. Use statistical (mathematical) scoring sheets to rank job candidates instead of subjective
approaches.
6. Ensure that the same level of training and support is offered to all new hires.
7. Ensure that coworkers treat all newcomers in a friendly and respectful manner
8. Confirm that performance criteria are clearly communicated and objectively measured.
- This service may not be desirable to people from cultures in which living with elderly relatives
and caring for them personally is the norm
- Flexible benefit plans that allow people to select from a wide range of benefits based on a points
system are both cost-effective and useful for addressing the disparate needs of a diverse group of
workers.
- Individuals who are demographically different from their coworkers may be more likely to feel
LOW COMMITMENT and to turnover, but a positive diversity climate can be helpful
- The training should focus on behaviours rather than attitudes, creating concrete connections to
day-to-day communication and interactions.
- A positive diversity climate based on mutual respect should be the GOAL.
II/ DIVERISTY IN GROUPS
- When people work in groups, they need to establish a common way of looking at and
accomplishing the major tasks, and they need to communicate with one another often.
- If they feel little sense of membership and cohesion in their groups, all group attributes are likely
to suffer.
- Teams of individuals who are highly intelligent, conscientious, and interested in working in
team settings are more effective.
 Diversity on these variables is likely to be a bad thing – it makes little sense to try to form teams
that mix in members who are significantly lower in intelligence, lower in conscientiousness, and
uninterested in teamwork
- A group made up entirely of assertive people who want to be in charge; a group whose members
all prefer to follow the lead of others will be less effective than one that mixes leaders and
followers.
- Diversity leads to better performance when innovation and creativity are required because many
different views are represented/
o Diverse groups may struggle because it takes longer to come to conclusions when there is
variation in opinions and approaches.
- Groups of diverse individuals will be much more effective if leaders can show how members
have common interest in the group’s success
- Evidence also shows leaders who emphasize goals and values in their leadership style are more
effective in managing diverse team.
III/ EFFECTIVE DIVERSITY PROGRAMS
1. They teach managers about the legal framework for equal employment opportunity and
encourage fair treatment of all people regardless of their demographic characteristics
2. They teach managers how a diverse workforce will be better able to serve a diverse market of
customers and clients
3. They foster personal development practices that bring out the skills and abilities all workers,
acknowledging how differences in perspective can be a valuable way to improve performance for
everyone
- Most negative reactions to diversity programs are based on the idea that discriminatory treatment
of any kind is UNFAIR, even if it seeks to redress historical inequities.
- Americans use a QUOTA-BASED approach called AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, under which a
specific percentage of jobs must be filled by minority candidates and there are concrete penalties,
such as fines, for having a workforces not representative of the local population
o This creates significant incentive for employers to hire historical disadvantage workers;
but it might be perceived as unfair in circumstances in which a slightly less qualified
candidate is give a preferentially over a more qualified candidate due to minority status.
 These programs can be controversial, although they have measurably improved labour
market outcomes for minorities.
- Canadian approaches to diversity management focus on process rather than outcomes.
o There are NOT quota-based but focused on providing fair opportunity, so they are called
EMPLOYMENT EQUITY PROGRAMS rather than affirmative action programs.
o These programs focus on ensuring that recruitment and selection processes are fair,
training is inclusive, and performance management is free from bias.
- Despite these criticism, the employment equity method has also measurably improved outcomes
for historically disadvantaged workers, usually with much less political resistance and between-
group tenson than when using affirmative action.
- A major study of the consequences of diversity programs concluded that organizations with
diversity training were not consistently more likely to have women and minorities in upper-
management positions than organization without diversity training.
- Researchers also suggest that diversity experiences are more likely to lead to positive adaption for
all parties:
1. The diversity experience undermines stereotypical attitudes.
2. The perceiver is motivated and able to consider a new perspective on others
3. The perceiver engages in stereotype suppression and generative thought in response to the
diversity experience
4. The positive experience of stereotype undermining is repeated frequently
- Organizational leaders should examine their workforce to determine whether target groups have
been underutilized
- If groups of employees are not proportionally represented in top management, managers should
look for any hidden barriers to advancement
- The organization should also clearly communicate its policies to employees so they can
understand how and why certain practices are followed
- Communications should focus as much as possible on qualifications and job performance;
emphasizing certain groups as needing more assistance might well backfire.
 If this system is part of the culture and history of the nation, a foreign company is unlikely
to be able to change local expectations or regulations