Question

How would you define the terms diversity and diversity management? How does the concept of diversity fit into team development?

Answer 1

Diversity brings forward the consideration of the presence of differences in a given population, in our case, a workforce, based on a number of demographic factors such as age, race, culture, and even skillset. Diversity, therefore, creates the consideration for a company to utilize diversity management, that allows a company to both accept and appreciate its presence and utilize it to the best of its ability by forming cross-functional teams, capable of handling challenges of a varying degree. Diversity management, therefore, can be considered as the process of recruiting, including and utilizing the factor of diversity in day to day processes. For today's business organization, the consideration of competitiveness is high, especially in the current landscape where the human resource provides the aspect of competitiveness. Since there are challenges that require creative solutions, traditional teams with limited skills might find it difficult to approach and execute remedies to such problems. The presence of diversity, however, allows a team to utilize a larger skill pool to choose from and therefore, the challenges can then be approached with a far greater scope of implementation. Such teams are more capable of handling challenges, but also require a higher degree of monitoring and have a higher adjustment period due to the dissimilarity of cultural aspects as well as other reasons that can cause conflicts to arise. This is why the presence of diversity is an important aspect of diversity management and diversity management, in turn, is a valid concept for consideration of developing a cross-functional team.

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