The Future International Manager by Laszlo Zsolnai & Antonio Tencati

Author:Laszlo Zsolnai & Antonio Tencati
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Figure 5.1 Gender and diversity management as an embedded system

At the macro level, a number of interrelated driving forces legitimize the need for diversity management and push organizations to change. These include political, economic, and demographic factors (Lorbiecki & Gavin, 2000, p. 20), along with changing perceptions of work and work-life balance, and new technologies.

At the organizational level, GDM should be incorporated into the organization’s mission, main objectives, strategies, structures, and processes (see Belinszki et al., 2003). As a strategic management concept, GDM simultaneously considers and influences the organizational culture and climate. Therefore, the specific definition of diversity used, the issues, the setting of diversity goals and strategies, and the implementation of new policies and changing practices are always deeply related to the organizational culture and climate of an organization. Keeping this in mind, an analysis of the organizational culture and climate is essential for a sustainable implementation of GDM. Common sense, assumptions, and implicit expectations construct and define gender and diversity issues in organizations. This makes organizational characteristics, especially an organization’s culture, climate, and power relations, crucial. In using the term “organizational culture,” we use Schein’s definition of “a pattern of shared basic assumptions, that was learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaption and internal integration that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems” (Schein, 2004, p. 17). This meaning of culture explains why stereotypes, unquestioned basic assumptions, and dominant group relations persist in organizations.

Employees transform their experiences with organizational culture into meanings, which in turn influence organizational climate. Schneider and Niles-Jolly (1994) describe climate as “the atmosphere that employees perceive is created in their organization by practices, procedures and rewards.” Climate can also be defined as a feeling about quality of trust and power relations. Cox (2001) describes the contextual aspects with the notion of “diversity climate,” characterized by individual-level factors (identity structures, prejudice, stereotyping, and personality), group/intergroup factors (cultural differences, ethnocentrism, and intergroup conflict) and organizational-level factors (culture and acculturation process, structural integration, informal integration, and instruction bias in human resource systems). The distinction between culture and climate is important here, because it points to the fact that the organization should support GDM in various ways and at multiple levels in order to fully consider the existing organizational conditions which, in turn, will create the climate that employers and employees will experience. Therefore, diversity-friendly organizational cultures and climates are ones where individuals feel their competences and contributions are valued, and they are included in informal networks to gain and exchange information. Collectively, these conditions contribute to improved job performance and satisfying colleague and supervisory relationships.

These conditions support the case for GDM as part of strategic management and change processes. According to Flood (1995), four different kinds of organizational change can be observed. There is process change (flows and their controls), structural change (functions, rules), cultural change (values, beliefs, social rules, relationships, work climates), and political change (power relations, group interests).

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