1.3 Diversity

The academic interest in diversity may be traced back to a concern expressed in Workforce 2000 (Johnston and Parker, 1987) that in the USA women and ethnic minority groups would by the mid-1990s comprise a larger fraction of the US adult workforce than the traditional white males who had historically been the majority. Managers would therefore be faced with having to manage a diverse workforce. Work processes also became more complicated, requiring an increasing use of multifunctional and multi-skilled teams often drawn from different parts of an organisation.

Collaboration, team work and an ability to manage people with different skills, knowledge and abilities have increasingly become part of a manager’s work. While diversity includes, for instance, age, ethnicity and race, physical disability and gender, it may also be extended to include economic class, marital status, sexual orientation, education level, mental health, etc. Some of these may be visible (ethnicity), others invisible (education) and many may be open to change (marital status); some refer to the characteristics of the individual (age), while some may be concerned with the beliefs, norms and values of a group (religion). (It may even be the case that a visible characteristic (for example, age) can suggest an invisible one (people in particular age groups may hold the generally-ascribed values of that age group.)) In addition, in recent years attention has increasingly been paid to specific aspects affecting a particular category of people – for instance, looking at how women are affected by the menopause (Atkinson et al., 2021; Jack et al,, 2019).

In work, diversity of thought may also be important. It may help to broaden the understanding of an issue and reduce the potential for groupthink. It may also help an organisation to find creative and novel solutions to problems and issues.

Diversity thus can be understood to mean that staff have different personal, social and cultural backgrounds and characteristics.