Utilizing a New Human Relations Framework to Leverage Workforce Diversity

In a global society, leveraging people’s diversities is one of the major challenges faced by organizations of any size in developed countries. Factors such as demographic changes, international and national anti-discrimination measures, globalization, service-economy shifts, stakeholder pressures on organizational commitment to corporate social responsibility, and technological advances are heightening the international attention paid to the increase in people’s diversities, thereby fostering discussion on their management in organizations. Although since the end of the 1980s professionals and academics have been debating how to devise efficient, effective and equitable ways to manage workforce diversity in organizations, they have produced neither a shared definition of diversity management nor a general accepted assessment on the outcomes that diversity management can deliver for organizations and persons. The aim of this chapter is to expand the understanding of diversity management by systematizing it on the basis of McGregor’s new human relations framework.