Integrating diversity and organizational change
efforts can enhance the success of most types of organizational change. All major
organizational change involves a cultural change, and a diversity effort is
cultural change at its core. It requires an organization to search its
collective soul and focus on essential aspects of its culture: seminal values;
organizational demands for conformity in thought, interpersonal style, and
action; power structure and power dynamics; employee participation; and inclusion/exclusion
issues, to name a few.
·
Cultural Differences
In addition, most
organizational changes involve diversity components. An organizational
redesign, for example, may combine functions that have previously been
separate, such as marketing and manufacturing. Certainly, marketing and
manufacturing have two distinct "cultures" and a successful redesign
needs to pay attention to those cultural issues involved. Diversity offers both
the perspective and the technology to deal with these intercultural issues,
whether they are triggered by redesigns, mergers, or global expansions.
When an organization is
redesigned, some of its subsystems discover they have to transact a new form of
"business" with new, unfamiliar "partners." Naturally, they
assume that their established styles of doing business, their traditional
practices, priorities, values, and methods, will be perfectly acceptable,
perfectly functional. Thus, marketing is surprised when this assumption turns
out to be invalid for manufacturing. Marketing assumes that its new partner,
manufacturing, simply has not appreciated the benefits of changing and adapting
to marketing's traditional way of
doing business.
·
Team Effectiveness
Team effectiveness has even clearer diversity connections. For a
team to develop and be effective, its members must find productive ways to both
elicit and manage individual and subgroup differences. In any group development
model, there
is always some version of a "storming" stage fairly
early in a group's development. The group must navigate this trouble some phase
successfully to evolve toward more productive phases of development. Successful
navigation cannot occur if differences are
submerged or conformity is forced upon diverse members.
·
Organizational Cultural Shift
In the case of a
complex organization change (for example, going from a production-driven to a
marketing-driven focus or moving toward Total Quality), a fundamental shift in
organizational culture must occur. A cultural change of this magnitude and
complexity poses a major challenge for most organizations because of the ambiguity involved and the enormity
of the task. An understanding of diversity enables organizations to find ways not
to insist on conformity in a major change process, but to encourage employees
to contribute, to take a fresh look, and to continuously evolve.
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