Equal Opportunities and Managing Diversity

[Name of the Institute]

Equal Opportunities and Managing Diversity

Introduction

Numerous researchers have emphasized in their research that the organizations across the globe have become more diverse in terms of race, age, ethnicity, gender, national origin, religion and other personal characteristics that significantly raise challenges for the human resources or in the manner people interact with each other in the organization. Pitts and Recascino (2010) and Gonzalez and Denisi (2009) emphasized that workforce diversity creates more challenges concerning the human resources in heterogeneous or multi-culture nations such as United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. There are many definitions in the available literature concerning the workforce diversity. The researchers however have common consensus on definition of workforce diversity where it is defined as anything that indicate differences and similarities among people in terms of their age, gender, sex, religion, origin place, mother tongue, cultural background, physical disabilities and abilities and sexual orientation (Olsen & Martins, 2012).

Discussion

Workforce Diversity

The researchers agreed that workforce diversity is among the most challenging and non-reversing trend across the globe that eventually cause the workplace to be diverse as it was ever before (Gonzalez & Denisi, 2009). There are people with different cultural backgrounds, races, ages, genders, sexual orientations almost in any organization across the world and all these differences among the people have profound impact in the manner they interact and work with each other within the organizational contexts. This is further suggested by Trenerry and Paradies (2012) that organizations today are living in isolation and hence these organizations are facing numerous challenges concerning the organization behavior.

The increasing workforce diversity poses both challenges and opportunities by creating positive and negative impact on the human resources. The managers that take the workforce diversity from the view point of opportunity and eventually treat everyone alike while at same time valuing the contribution of every individual and groups towards the growth and success of organization experience more positive impact on human resources through valuable employees, job satisfaction, and higher productivity and lesser communication problems. The reverse of this is on the other hand is also true (Olsen & Martins, 2012).

Challenges of Human Resources and Equal Opportunities

There are challenges related to human resources and equal opportunities in organizations which vary in the severity and scope and the way organization culture and structure is prevalent. In this regard, the following section discusses the challenges of organization in a detailed manner.

Job Satisfaction

Addressing the job satisfaction of the employees is considered as one of the important dimension of challenges of human resources and equal opportunities (Klotz & Buckley, 2013). This organizational challenge becomes more challenging when it is affected by the workforce diversity. Job satisfaction, as discussed by authors such as Qiu and Peschek (2012), is the notion that indicates that positive and pleasurable emotional state of an employee that eventually transmutes into the appraisal of employee's job and associated experiences with that job. In addition to that, job satisfaction describes the internal state of the employee through which ...