In this article I would like to outline where the idea of ​​diversity management came from, the different schools of thought, and how an author named Deborah R. Litvin believes that diversity can remain relevant in the future.

The Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s in the US gave rise to Equal Employment Opportunity legislation and Affirmative Action programs to encourage marginalized members of society, such as blacks, other ethnic groups and women, to join the labor force.

Diversity in the workplace became an issue in the late 1980s when Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the 21st Century (Johnston & Packer 1987) predicted “unprecedented dramatic demographic shifts sufficient to change the workforce homogeneous corporate America into a diverse workforce. At that time, diversity was seen as a threat to society. While past ethnicities willingly threw themselves into the homogenizing American melting pot, there was a fear that new ethnicities would cling to their cultural identity and refuse to “merge” into American society. The metaphors used to describe this situation were “salad bowl, mosaic, and tapestry”, indicating that instead of melting into one another, the units would “maintain their individual identity even when combined into a final product”.

Another argument put forward by early diversity consultants was that “managing diversity was a business imperative.” It was suggested that organizations should manage diversity for two reasons:

1) to address the threats and challenges posed by its new diverse workforce
2) to capitalize on diversity for business reasons, such as increased competitiveness, better customer service, and increased profitability.

The civil rights argument was never very popular with employers. The argument that a diverse workforce contributed to better productivity was more appealing to corporate clients. The emphasis shifted from social justice to employer demand.

Although several studies (such as the 5-year study conducted by the Diversity Research Network DRN in 2003) have not been able to empirically prove that a diverse workforce does indeed increase productivity, they did say that there are some benefits to diversity initiatives (Society for Human Resource Management – Workplace Diversity Toolkit 2003)

1) You can improve the quality of your organization’s workforce
2) capitalize on new markets: customers are becoming even more diverse than the workforce
3) recognized diversity initiatives will attract the best and brightest employees to a company
4) bring greater creativity
5) Making the adaptations required by diversity keeps an organization flexible and well-developed.

The DRN study concluded that “there were few direct effects of diversity on performance, either positive or negative. [Our findings] They suggest the need to go beyond the business case argument to promote diversity practice in the industry.

So what’s next? How can it be shown that diversity is indeed relevant to the industry? Diversity professionals know that they are expected to prove their efforts contribute to the bottom line or face being written off as a bad investment.

Deborah R. Litvin refers to the work of Joseph Czikszentmihalyi 2003

“The purpose of organizations, including commercial organizations, is to improve human well-being, so the existence of an organization (no matter how profitable) is only meaningful if it enriches the lives of its members”

According to the business case, human beings are the means and the achievement of organizational goals, while the alternative reasoning considers organizations as the instruments whose purpose is to serve the development, survival and happiness needs of their members. She concludes that short-term thinking puts organizations at the center, but the long-term vision is the development of a worldwide stock of human capabilities that are conducive to the survival of the human race.