The core challenges of managing diversity in the workplace today Essay - 1

The core challenges of managing diversity in the workplace today - Essay Example Thus, it is important to consider the behavioral aspects of human resources. As important factor that determines their behavior is their backgrounds, which are unique in several ways. Such uniqueness differentiates one from other; and hence the entire workforce becomes diverse in several respects. This essay addresses the issues arising from managing diverse workforce. To place the essay in a perspective, the following section explores the diverse characteristics of workforce. This essay would subsequently explore how best this diverse workforce could be managed. There are several ways of defining diversity of labor force. In a simplest form, the diversity can be associated with the uniqueness of labor force - as every individual tends to exhibit behavior that is unique to the individual concerned. Ferris, Frink and Galang define diversity as, â€Å".. any attribute that humans are likely to use to tell themselves, ‘that person is different from me† (Ferris, Frink and Galang, 1993, p. 42). In this case, individuals are taken as unit of analysis. Considering the number of labors employed by any organization, it is near impossible to address workforce by taking individuals as a category. This requires some aggregation, and the criteria adopted should reflect the diversity. While the individual differences are important, these authors go on to suggest that the larger factors such as race, sex, age, values, and cultural norms should be taken into account while understanding the diversity of workforce. Thus, Westerns workers become one category; whereas Asian workers become another category. Within Western society, the English workers are different from that of German and French Workers. Thus diversity of workforce can be understood in different ways depending upon the context and the analytical purpose. Within America, there is lots of diversity of workforce due to