iso-NEWS - Institut für Sozialforschung und Sozialwirtschaft eV

Ingrid Matthäi: ’Managing Diversity’
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Fig. 4: Characteristics of ‘mono-cultural’ and ‘multi-cultural’ organizations
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‘Mono-cultural’ organization ‘Multi-cultural’ organization
‘Homogenous’ workforce Diverse workfoce
Dominant group determines values, norms
rituals, behaviour, rules, decisions
iso-Mitteilungen Nr. 3/August 2004
Pluralism
Being different = being deficient Valuing differences
Equality = ‘to lump together’, neglecting
traditional rights and privileges
Minority groups should assimilate
Individuals have to adopt and accept the
rules and values of the dominant group
Equal employment and career opportunities;
fairness, encompassing differences and similarities
between people
No prejudices or discrimination, respecting
variety
Organization has to learn and adopt
Individuals have to change Organizational change
We can summarize that in a ‘homogenous’
or ‘mono-cultural’ organization the
individual has to adapt, but in a ‘diverse’
organization the organization has to
adapt. That is a completely different approach
and indeed a great challenge for
each organization. In particular, practicing
‘diversity’ in personnel policy seems to be
a promising way for unemployed persons
belonging to ‘problem groups’ in gaining
access to the internal labour markets of
the companies because in a ‘diversitybased’
selection procedure they would be
treated and valued as individuals and not
primarily as ‘group representatives’.
3. Forecast
In spite of various economic and immaterial
benefits the concept of ‘managing
diversity’ has not yet been implemented in
many German companies, especially not
in small and medium enterprises. The innovative
firms that practice a ‘diversity man-
agement’ generally are the ‘big players’
with international activities. These companies
want to transform the corporate identity
and corporate culture into a ‘multicultural’
organization to get image and
cross-cultural advantages especially in
foreign markets and in the international
labour market. Realizing their globalization
strategies these companies need more
managers with international experiences
or cross-cultural managers and professionals.
In ‘search of excellence’ these companies
develop elaborated human resource
programs that value diversity in
order to get competitive advantages in
the ‘war for talents’ (Matthäi 2002). These
companies do not implement an organizational
concept - such elaborated and
ambitious as ‘managing diversity’ is - only
to improve the access to their internal labour
markets for the so called ‘problem
groups’ of the external labour market. First
results in our EQUAL-project confirm this
hypothesis. The regional companies we
already interviewed are not really inter-