Answer to Question 1
Answer: The people management benefits that organizations get because of their workforce diversity efforts revolve around attracting and retaining a talented workforce. Organizations want a talented workforce because it's the people their skills, abilities, and experiences who make an organization successful. Positive and explicit workforce diversity efforts can help organizations attract and keep talented diverse people and make the best of the talents those individuals bring to the workplace. In addition, another important people management benefit is that as companies rely more on employee teams in the workplace, those work teams with diverse backgrounds often bring different and unique perspectives to discussions, which can result in more creative ideas and solutions. However, recent research has indicated that such benefits might be hard to come by in teams performing more interdependent tasks over a long period of time. Such situations also present more opportunities for conflicts and resentments to build. But, as the researchers pointed out, that simply means that those teams may need stronger team training and coaching to facilitate group decision making and conflict resolution.
Answer to Question 2
Answer: The demographic characteristics that we tend to think of when we think of diversity age, race, gender, ethnicity, etc. are just the tip of the iceberg. These demographic differences reflect surface-level diversity, which are easily perceived differences that may trigger certain stereotypes, but that do not necessarily reflect the ways people think or feel. Such surface-level differences in characteristics can affect the way people perceive others, especially when it comes to assumptions or stereotyping. However, as people get to know one another, these surface-level differences become less important and deep-level diversity differences in values, personality, and work preferences becomes more important. These deep-level differences can affect the way people view organizational work rewards, communicate, react to leaders, negotiate, and generally behave at work.
Faith Ringgold, God Bless America, No. 13 from the series American People.
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