A Positive Experience of Diversity Management: The Influence of Leadership Style (original) (raw)

Leadership Competencies for Managing Diversity

2011

The new understanding of diversity involves more than increasing the number of different identity groups on the payroll. An important proposal is that the experience of diversity in an organisation results from pervasive styles of management. This article dealt with the specific paradigms of diversitymanagement and leadership style theory used to address the research problem in the empirical study, namely

Transformational leadership, diversity climate, and job satisfaction in selected South African companies

Journal of Psychology in Africa, 2019

This study investigated the relationship between transformational leadership, diversity climate, and job satisfaction in a selection of South African companies. Participants were a convenience sample of 263 employees from the Gauteng Province (white = 69 .3%). They completed measures for transformational leadership, diversity climate, and job satisfaction. Structural Equation Modelling analysis revealed transformational leadership to directly predict job satisfaction and diversity climate, and to mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and job satisfaction. Moreover, transformational leadership directly and positively predicted quality of workplace diversity climate. Future leaders and managers should leverage an organisation's diversity climate for job satisfaction applying transformational leadership strategies .

Leadership Strategy in Managing Workplace Diversity

2021

Leadership is how all the possible dimensions of diversity are managing an organization develops an essential ingredient for any workplace that wants to build happier, more productive and more effective workplaces. Leadership sets the tone for the rest of the organization, recognizing and assessing cultural differences helps the organization to frame sound workforce management strategy and in developing positive workplace outcomes. The way leaders working in global arena have to take cultural differences and values into the main consideration while formulating an effective motivation and leadership strategy. Diversity carries out specific strategies to get leaders have initiated efforts that highlighting a conceptual paper concept and few challenges of workforce diversity. It needs to be the official set application of motivation, leadership practices and also discusses the real-life diversity management. The key area to look within the leadership team workplace diversity is a challenge for everyone, especially managers and business owners. This paper underlines a necessary step to ensure that diversity remains a core business value, even leadership contributes an idea to management policy makers for designing an oriented motivational and leadership strategy for managing a diversified workforce.

Diversity as an aspect of effective leadership: Integrating and moving forward

Leadership and Organization Development Journal, 2016

The paper aims at elaborating an ethically grounded framework that positions diversity considerations in a continuum of various leadership theories. We seek to differentiate between distinct leadership styles, the latter being entrenched in organizational environments valuing, affirming and supporting diversity. We proceed to a brief review of the extant literature on leadership and diversity by properly distinguishing between diverse followers and diverse leaders on one hand, and leadership styles and diversity-related outcomes, on the other. We then provide a rationale for ethical approaches to the leadership and diversity agenda. Four distinct theoretical frameworks capturing the importance of emerging leadership theories (ethical, servant, spiritual and authentic leadership) for informing caring and inclusive climates, are introduced. We also seek to highlight the importance of delineating diversity-friendly leadership styles that better fit to the specific context in which diverse leaders operate and through which diverse followers encounter and interact with diverse leaders The paper offers certain insights into the particular conditions that may help organizational leaders implement a diversity strategy facilitating thriving and fulfillment of diverse others. In this respect, we discuss the core elements of an ethically-grounded agenda by advancing and elaborating on distinct ethical leadership frameworks that are pertinent to, and commensurate with inclusive diversity management objectives.

What's Your Style? Individual Leadership and Diversity Management

2021

Steady and substantial demographic changes have affected organizations, including the increasing presence of women, racial minorities, and immigrants in the workplace and in client and customer populations (Abella, 1984; Towers Perrin and The Hudson Institute, 1990). The issue of managing a diverse workforce is increasingly gaining recognition as an important topic of research and theorizing (Konrad, 2003). However, not much research exists regarding the combination of tailored styles of leadership and its application to different demographic groups. By analyzing themes regarding the adaptation of leaders to the differences among their subordinates, we can gain greater insight into improving diverse workplaces. A large discrepancy exists between the intervention as proposed in the theoretical literature and what actually happens in the workplace under the name of managing diversity. Diversity programs are frequently limited to awareness or skill-building training. Diversity manageme...

Exploring workplace diversity and organisational effectiveness: A South African exploratory case study

SA Journal of Human Resource Management

Orientation: Transformation and managing diversity are organisational imperatives, especially in South Africa. Thus, it is important for international companies with major operations in South Africa (SA) to embrace the benefits of managing a divergent workforce and translate this for organisational benefits.Research purpose: The article explores the perceptions of management and staff on diversity and its value to the organisation, by empirically evaluating the relationship with organisational effectiveness and performance through the development and testing of five hypotheses.Motivation for the study: Legislation has made it mandatory for transformation of the South African workplace and ensuring that diversity is embraced. However, not all companies have fully understood the benefits of recruiting and managing diverse teams for the benefit of the organisation.Research approach, design and method: Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were used, whereby a survey was conducte...

A Theoretical Approach to the Experience of Diversity Management: Mead Revisited

Journal of Social Sciences

The growing importance of managing workplace diversity necessitates investigating leadership style as a component of diversity management experience. The article described the interactionist viewpoint as an underpinning theory in the study of leadership style as a component of diversity management experience. The employee experience of diversity management is interpreted through symbolic meaning. The individual is constantly reacting to an organized community in expressing himself and attitudes involved are gained from the group, but the individual has the opportunity of giving them an expression. Symbolic interactionism stresses the form of interaction that emerges from a particular situation. Leaders play a pivotal role in establishing the character and nature of the organisation experienced by employees. The leaders of organisations are tasked with differentiating their organisations through greater efficiencies in performance, within a changing environment in which nationality, colour, religion, ethnicity, disability, gender, sexual orientation and generational differences are key elements of the diverse workforce.

The indirect effect of servant leadership on employee attitudes through diversity climate in selected South African organisations

SA Journal of Human Resource Management

Orientation: Organisations are continuously diversifying their workforces and require information on how to benefit from positive diversity-related outputs. Servant leadership might provide a solution to improve diversity-related outputs. Literature proposes that servant leadership, diversity climate and employee outputs are related; yet, literature is silent on how these observations would operate in a transitional environment where organisations are intentionally attempting to correct inherited workforce imbalances.Research purpose: The study examined indirect effects of diversity climate on the relationship between servant leadership and employee attitudes.Motivation for the study: Examinations of the indirect effects of diversity climate are limited.Method: A quantitative approach with cross-sectional design collected 230 responses from a convenience sample. Respondents completed assessments for servant leadership, diversity climate, organisational commitment, job satisfaction a...

New directions for research and practice in diversity leadership

The Leadership Quarterly, 1996

From the articles published in the two parts of this special issue as well as an overview of research in leadership and diversity, this chapter discusses directions and implications for diversity leadership research and practice Drawing from diversity perspectives. we suggest that diversity leadership must consider: (a) the impact of social group identities embedded in organization group identities; (b) the unconscious sociopsychological processes; (cl the political aspects of leadership; and (d) the follower perspectives. From the field of leadership. we highlight four leadership frameworks that we think have the greatest potential to contribute to diversity leadership. namely, (i) attribution theories of leadership and followership, (ii) theories of leadership prototypes. (iii) the leader-member exchange model. and (iv) the behavioral complexity model. In connecting the two fields, we propose new directions for research and discuss practical issues of how organizations can develop diverse and global leaders and how these leaders themselves could lead diversity more effectively.