Advantages and Disadvantages of Diversity

Name

Instructor

Subject

Date

Advantages and Disadvantages of Diversity

In this day and age, companies must step up their game in order to remain relevant and competitive in the market. Therefore, adopting diversity into their system is an indispensable imperative that companies should embrace in order to enhance the company’s performance. Diversity in companies mainly constitutes acceptance, appreciation and recognition of staff with different backgrounds. Different sexual orientation, age, religion, race, gender, ethnicity, class, mental and physical abilities are some of the factors that create diversity at work. Employers should consider employees with diverse background during recruitment in order to improve the quality and performance of the organization in the competitive job market.

Women, colored people, people with disabilities and immigrants are normally the marginalized individuals at the workplace. Employers should see to it that everybody at work is accorded equal treatment by providing an enabling environment for creativity, productivity and teamwork for all. This is termed as diversity staffing (De’Campo web). Most employees prefer to work in an environment where diversity at all levels is encouraged. Companies should integrate the 3R’s of diversity for a company’s success, which are Retention, Results and Recruitment.

However, no matter how important this imperative is for companies, it becomes utterly difficult for most companies achieving it. This is because most organizations have the wrong perception of diversity, and they fail to incorporate all levels of diversity. One of the common mistakes that they make is to consider the visible dimension of diversity, which is mainly gender and race. This makes them to omit other forms of diversity such as disability, religion, sexual orientation, geographic background and reasoning ability. Another common mistake is diversifying the lower ranks of employment, but there is no diversity up the ladder in the management sector. In order to address this problem, organizations should include all workers in the company’s strategy, mission and vision, and acknowledge their skills and areas of knowledge for the overall excellence of the organization (Lieberman web).

Diversity has both merits and demerits. The benefits of diversity include diverse experience, where different workers have peculiar perception and experience from their various cultural backgrounds atop their individuality. Proper management of this diversity complements the workers’ weaknesses and leverages their strengths in order to enhance the impact on the workforce. Secondly, exposure to vari.............