The purpose of this chapter is to clearly define and address the original intended usage of terms among academicians, the law, and businesses regarding diversity: workforce diversity (cultural diversity and gender diversity) and global diversity (cultural diversity and multicultural diversity). The proposed comprehensive Guidelines for Diversity Training Program as common ground to shared gain takes into consideration different paradigms of various parties (academicians, politicians, and practitioners) in two ways. First, the Diversity Training Program utilizes the academicians' rhetorical definitions of diversity, incorporates the legality component of diversity, and transforms it into a functional strategy to assist firms with hiring diverse competent staffs who possess the appropriate KSAOs qualifications as common ground to shared gain. Second, the Diversity Training Program starts with diversity from the beginning (with the recruiting and selecting), supports diversity through its process (with diversity appreciation), and continues to promote diversity thereafter (with mentorship).
TopRhetoric Of Diversity
The twenty-first-century organization is characterized by ever-increasing global competition, ever-changing customer expectations, and ever-increasing change (Cao, Clarke, & Lehaney, 2003). The world’s increasing globalization requires more interaction among people from diverse cultures, beliefs, and backgrounds than ever before. To respond to these pressures, many organizations face a situation where they “either change or die” (Beer & Nohria, 2000, p. 133), with “approximately 84 per cent of American companies…undergoing at least one major business transformation” (Romano, 1995, p. 6). However, while the management of change (MOC) has become an increasingly important area for management attention, the downside is that it seems to suffer adversely high failure rates, at times above 70% (Siegal, Church, Javitch, Waclawski, Burd, Bazigos, Yang, Anderson-Rudolp, & Burke, 1996; Spector & Beer, 1994; Stanton, Hammer, & Power, 1993).
Quite often, the high failure rate is a result caused by the fact that managing diversity is a concept that sounds good in theory, but has provided mixed results in practice. Top managers are becoming increasingly frustrated and disenchanted with managing diversity programs that have cost organizations billions of dollars over the years, but have yielded little in the way of identifiable positive impact on the bottom line (Hansen, 2003; Kochan, Bezrukova, Ely, Jackson, Aparna, Jehn, Leonard, Levin, & Thomas, 2002; Naff & Kellough, 2003).