Human Resource Diversity Research Articles

Disability as Constructed Difference: A Literature Review and Research Agenda for Management and Organization Studies

Disability theory and disabled people's voices have remained marginal in attempts to include a wider range of theoretical perspectives and voices in organization studies. This includes studies of the normative assumptions underpinning socially constructed categories of difference. This paper addresses this gap by reviewing the literature on social categories of difference, intersectional studies and studies across human resource management and diversity literatures. The argument here is that, while research has begun to move from an individualized discourse of disability, disability remains inadequately theorized as a constructed difference. The paper reviews the disability studies literature to identify the relevance of conceptualizing disability for work organizations, problematizes the concepts of disability and impairment and differentiates competing discourses of disability. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it offers an alternative social interpretation discourse which argues that disability is constructed as a negated difference through assumed ableism, which is a normative expectation of non‐disability. Second, it presents impairment effects as legitimate organizing requirements rather than individualized problems. The paper argues impairment effects, the effects of bodily and cognitive variation, have legitimate implications for how disabled people negotiate organizing contexts. Third, it develops a disability studies lens to advance theoretical approaches to the study of social categories of difference in the field of management and organization studies.

Why does firm reputation in human resource policies influence college students? The mechanisms underlying job pursuit intentions

AbstractBusiness periodicals, such as Fortune magazine, rank organizations in lists such as the “Best Companies to Work For,” providing applicants with information about firms' human resource practices, including pay, benefits, work‐life, and diversity practices. It is not clear what influence this reputational information about HR practices has on applicant interest in pursuing employment or, more important, why it does so. Given that firms invest substantial resources in HR practices to vie for positions on these lists, the current study sought to fill these gaps in the literature. In the 2 (compensation) × 2 (work‐family) × 2 (diversity) factorial design, 232 college students read about magazine rankings in which a firm's reputation in each HR practice was manipulated as ranking either high or low relative to competitors. We examined perceptions of organizational prestige, anticipated organizational support, and anticipated role performance as mechanisms that explain the influence of HR practice reputation on job pursuit intentions. Our results indicate that a firm's reputation in compensation, work‐family, and diversity efforts increase college students' intentions to pursue employment with a firm. They do so because college students perceive that the organization is prestigious, will be supportive, and will foster their job performance. Our results suggest that a strong employer brand derived from employee‐centered HR practices is important for recruiting college students. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

La sostenibilidad del Sistema Nacional de Salud en España

The Spanish National Health System (SNHS) has sustainability problems resulting from weaknesses in institutional design and governance compounded by the economic crisis it faces. The global economic crisis has had a particularly virulent impact in Spain, characterized by high levels of unemployment and public and private debt. Fiscal adjustment policies implemented may significantly compromise the SNHS. Along with general funding problems, the strong territorial decentralization of health jurisdictions in the Autonomous Communities has not been backed up by efficient State-level health coordination. The SNHS suffers from problems in its rules of governance, its autonomous financing system, human resource policies and diversity of direct and indirect management models in different Autonomous Communities. A reform strategy in Spanish healthcare governancemust be articulated within the context of a broader review of public policies to stabilize the lines of defense of the welfare state. Within the scope of the health sector, the financing system must be improved and institutional changes to increase efficiency must be implemented.

Effects of human resource diversity management on organizational citizen behaviour in the Chinese context

In this study we explored the effects of human resource diversity management (HRDM) on organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB). The data for this study were collected from 530 Chinese employees in a range of industries. The results of our study indicate that overall, HRDM is positively related to OCB. We found that compensation diversity management is the strongest predictor of OCB. Recruitment and selection diversity management is also significantly associated with OCB. Our hypotheses regarding the relationship between training and development and performance appraisal diversity management with OCB were not supported. Results of our study indicate that the link between diversity management in specific HRM functions and OCB may depend on the focus of HR diversity management in a particular national context. This focus appears to be guided by salient Chinese specific diversity issues and the characteristics of the Confucian HRM.

Who would delay retirement? Typologies of older workers

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to review the existing literature linked to older workers' work orientations and the use of typologies to identify groups of older workers according to their work and retirement patterns.Design/methodology/approachThe approach taken entails reviewing books and academic journals from the area of human resource management, retirement, diversity and pensions. The paper focuses on the industrial sociology literature as the grounding for the construction of older worker typologies.FindingsThe review of the typologies reveals that the older workforce is a wide range of workers whose experience in work impacts their attitude toward and planning for retirement. Policy makers cannot, therefore, take a “one size fits all” approach to designing incentives for delaying retirement.Research limitations/implicationsThe main limitation of the review is that the studies which have been reviewed are based on both qualitative and quantitative data and have focused on different aspects of later life work, such as early retirement, ill‐health retirements, pensions and staying in work past retirement age.Practical implicationsThe review has a number of practical implications for HR practitioners, government, and trade unions who want to develop targeted incentives for older workers to delay retirement.Originality/valueThe originality of the review is that it is unique in bringing together the range of literature on older worker typologies in order to identify overarching themes. The review found that Titmuss' “two nations” provides a useful model for identifying groups of older workers who are in most need of support.

Cybernating the academe: Centralized scholarly ranking and visibility of scholars in the developing world

This article uses a metaphor of social cybernetics to explain the neoliberal science politics manifest in the deployment of information technology to homogenize, centralize and globalize scholarly performance criteria, a development that benefits the developed regions of the world that already have a competitive advantage in the use of the technologies. The international citation indexes collect, organize and analyse skewed proportions of the world’s scholarly publications mainly from the North and make generalizations about the state and structure of global scientific knowledge, thus exerting undue control and discipline on global intellectual discourse. The databases do not accord any deference to the global diversity and complexity in human and other resources. However, autonomous databases that have regional, national and organizational focuses are beginning to emerge, but such an infrastructure is not yet available in Africa and many other developing regions. It is envisaged, however, that the current African Citation Index Project of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa will contribute in bridging this gap.

Diversity in Healthcare: Driven by Leadership

IN HEALTHCARE, diversity is an organizational leadership issue that is most often addressed through legal policies regarding equal opportunity, affirmative action, and nondiscrimination statutes. The lead articles outline additional methods, such as education, collection of data on racial and ethnic disparities, and management of diversity in clinical services, patient care, leadership, human resources, and community relations as factors to address considering diversity issues. In my experience as a healthcare executive, leadership representation, organizational culture, and organizational support of diversity are the most powerful change agents and should be the primary focus of diversity initiatives. The concept of diversity is inclusive and ultimately influences the global community. Diversity in the workplace creates a productive environment in which individual differences contribute to overall success. Diversity should based on learning from others whose perspectives are different from our own and creating workplace practices that support such learning. A global learning community results leadership welcomes differences and fosters an organizational culture that supports constructive conflict. DIVERSITY: DRIVEN BY LEADERSHIP Diversity in organizations is driven by flexible leaders who value change. Currently, healthcare organizations recruit management that matches the majority population of the organization. As a result, the demography of the leadership fails to reflect the diversity of the communities they serve. Hospital leaders are predominantly Caucasian men, but the communities they serve are made up of multiple ethnic groups. In the lead articles, Cordova, Beaudin, and Iwanabe and Armada and Hubbard point out that the majority population in the United States continues to decrease as minority populations grow. Lin GrensingPophal (1999) writes, when employers focus too keenly on culture fit in the hiring process, they can develop blind spots for other problems - such as inadvertently discriminating against protected classes of workers, developing a workforce that lacks complementary skills and personalities or downplaying the importance of competency-based skill sets. Overemphasizing diversity in the hiring process and ignoring the big picture can result in an inability to effectively change the culture. Armada and Hubbard write that over the next 40 years, people of color are expected to account for 90 percent of U.S. population growth. The risk is high that healthcare organizations will continue to poorly manage diversity initiatives even as the culture evolves. This unmanaged diversity will cause organizational conflict. In response, healthcare organizations should move toward bottom-up diversity initiatives supported from the top down. Keith Swenson, a principal at William Mercer, Inc., believes that a strong diversity program requires a clear understanding of the organization's values (GrensingPophal 1999). The organization must agree on the values, and the values should be exemplified and used as benchmarks at every stage of the employment process. Once organizational culture and values are clearly established, the leadership must ensure that the organization also addresses factors such as legal concerns related to discrimination. The corporate leadership of some large healthcare systems have made diversity programs mandatory for all entities within the system. However, these initiatives are not always successfully adopted. I worked for an organization in which the hospital leadership ignored the system's diversity initiatives. A group of senior leaders involved in executive recruitment stated that there were no minority candidates in the market who could meet the criteria for a vacant senior leadership position. I had the opportunity to review the credentials of some of the candidates. I was surprised to learn that those who moved forward in the hiring process were Caucasians less qualified than some of the minority candidates. …

The Contingent Employment In the Italian Healthcare Sector - Advantages and Troubles of the Human Resource Diversity Management

The firms use a quantity of variables to face their need of flexibility, as for the human resources, there is a continuous huge resort to new temporary contracts, including both LDC – limited duration contracts and TAWs – temporary agency works, which differ from the long-term and permanent employment model (Barker and Christensen, 1998; Volberda, 1999; Costa, 2001; Bergstrom and Storrie, 2003).In Italy, the contingent employment phenomenon (in particular TAWs) is well expressed in the healthcare sector and it is widely spread among many qualified professionals, first of all the nursing staff.In the healthcare sector, contextually to the flexibility need, the organizations find the necessity to have a good health service quality and to equip themselves with motivated, self-contained, high skilled and high committed workers, who feels a strong identification with the organization. However, those necessities, such as the contingent work spreading and the HR valorization, hardly match together and involve a different approach to the HR management. In fact, the massive use of temporary workers implicate an increasing complexity for the healthcare organizations, that have to deal with several types of workers in the same work groups or in the same professional categories. Moreover, the different contractual status may seriously affect the workers behavior as well as the employment relationships and their performances.In Italy, isolated experiences apart, there are no useful results or well-founded experiences to study that phenomenon and to give evidence to the actuality of it, especially in the healthcare sector. In the light of these assumptions, we assume the main challenge that healthcare organizations are going to face is defining a set of diversified and integrated HR management policies. In other words, HR managers will have to develop and define operational HR choices focused on the valorization of the differences, specifically applying the Diversity Management (DM) and working on the idea that their employees are no more the permanent ones (Lorbiecki and Jack, 2000; Barabino, Jacobs and Maggio, 2000, 2001).This study arises as a working paper issued by early literature analysis and early opinions about the contingent employment and the HR management in the healthcare sector, which is the subject of the research carried out by the two authors in their Phd careers.

Roles and Challenges of Human Resource Business Partners

Human resource business partners are human resource specialists who can take up role of aligning with organization goals to improve business performance and develop organizational culture. Business partnering refers to the way that the human resource function is restructured into different roles, with the aim of providing improved human resource services to the organisation. In this new role, human resource professionals who are managers and supervisors must take on the emerging roles of business partner, change agent, and leader in radically new organizational structures, quite different from those of the past. The present study analyses the differentiating roles & responsibilities and diverse challenges that are encountered by business partners in human resource management in selected industries of India. The data for the study was collected from a sample of thirty Indian human resources professionals from different industries such as IT, ITeS, manufacturing, R& D, and management consulting. The study addresses the opportunities, challenges, and contributions of human resources business partners in organizations in different industries. The study proposes a new model for human resources diversity and execution flexibility, providing an insight into the differentiation factors and freedom of execution for human resource professionals.

Managing diversity through human resource management: an international perspective and conceptual framework

This paper critically reviews the literature on managing diversity through human resource management (HRM). We discuss the major issues and objectives of managing diversity and examine the state of human resource diversity management practices in organizations. Our review shows that inequality and discrimination still widely exist and HRM has focused mainly on compliance with equal employment opportunity (EEO) and affirmative action (AA) legislation. Less attention has been paid to valuing, developing and making use of diversity. Our review reveals limited literature examining how diversity is managed in organizations through effective human resource management. We develop a framework that presents strategies for HR diversity management at the strategic, tactical and operational levels. Our review also discusses the implications for practice and further research.

Making the Connection Between Formal Human Resource Diversity Practices and Organizational Effectiveness: Behind Management Fashion

ABSTRACT: Formal human resource diversity programs have experienced rapid growth; yet research on how these initiatives influence organizational effectiveness remains insufficient. This research explores formal diversity programs' influence on organizational effectiveness using universalistic and contingency frameworks. Our findings show that universally, diversity practices strongly and negatively relate to turnover. Organizations with innovative strategies coupled with formal diversity practices had improved productivity and market performance supporting contingency notions. Future research should employ both the universalistic and contingency theories in combination for a more in-depth understanding of construct relationships.

Do race and gender matter in international assignments to/from Asia Pacific? An exploratory study of attitudes among Chinese

AbstractBased on a survey of EMBA students in China and South Korea, this article examines how two sensitive but potentially salient criteria—race and gender—affect the selection of an executive to head the (a) foreign operations of a U.S. multinational in China and South Korea and (b) newly acquired U.S. operations of a Korean multinational. The results reveal a fairly complex picture of how gender, race, and the interplay of these two factors might affect these decisions. In the Korean sample, competencies mattered more than race and gender in a senior executive appointment to the U.S. operations of Korean multinationals. Also in the Korean sample, race and gender outweighed competencies in assignments to Korea. In the Chinese sample, competencies outweighed race and gender in a senior executive appointment in China. Overall, Koreans had a more positive attitude toward foreign‐born Koreans than the Chinese toward foreign‐born Chinese for senior executive appointments. Implications for international human resource management and diversity management, both theoretical and applied, are discussed. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Young workers and the National Minimum Wage

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the basis of the Low Pay Commission's (LPC) presumption of the “distinctiveness” of young workers aged 16 and 17 in the absence of any systematic and objective basis for determining “fair pay”. In the context of labour market theories and the issues they raise in relation to skill, training and pay, the paper questions the presumption that young workers are distinctive with reference to contemporary notions of skill and training requirements.Design/methodology/approachUsing a sub‐sample of hospitality businesses in North Wales, the paper presents selected evidence from semi‐structured interviews about firms’ pay and employment practices that included a systematic method to enable managers to provide some objectively justifiable measures of job content and perceptions of personal attributes in relation to the pay of 16‐ and 17‐year‐old workers compared with their older counterparts.FindingsEmployers’ informal and pragmatic employment and pay practices both reflect and reinforce the LPC's presumption of distinctiveness for a predominantly student labour force. This indicative and exploratory method of quantifying jobs and personal attributes in relation to pay appears to have some validity, although the sorts of skills that are associated with young workers’ jobs may not be fully recognised or valued, reinforcing inequality and discrimination in some cases.Originality/valueIn raising awareness of potential inequality of treatment and discrimination in the context of age discrimination legislation, the paper will be of interest to researchers in employment relations, human resource management, equality and diversity management, minimum wages and the hospitality industry.

The impact of racial diversity on intermediate and long‐term performance: The moderating role of environmental context

AbstractWe conduct a firm‐level, 6‐year longitudinal analysis on the impact that racial diversity in human resources has on financial performance. When considering short‐term performance outcomes, we predict a curvilinear relationship between diversity and performance (i.e., firm productivity). Although we find evidence of a U‐shaped relationship between racial diversity and productivity, the relationship is stronger in service‐oriented relative to manufacturing‐oriented industries and in more stable vs. volatile environments. For longer‐term profitability, we propose and find support for more of a positive linear relationship between diversity and performance (i.e., Tobin's q) than a nonlinear one. This linear effect is stronger and more positive in munificent compared to resource‐scare environments. Thus, we aid in reconciling existing, often contradictory, studies by demonstrating the potential short‐term vs. long‐term impact of racial diversity on performance. We offer implications for future research on diversity considering the current and projected demographic landscape. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Managing workforce diversity in South African schools

An attempt is made to assess the effect of human resource diversity in South Africa and provide strategies for managing such diverse institutions. A pilot study using questionnaires was conducted to determine the circumstances surrounding workforce diversity in a number of educational institutions. Thereafter, qualitative interviews provided in-depth perspectives on issues such as individualism vs. collectivism, gender, assumptions, attitudes and affirmative action measures. The data emerging from the investigation provided clear guidelines for handling diversity in institutions and suggest the necessity for creating an understanding and recognition of differences, providing for reward and support and for developing a sound diversity management strategy.

A Look at the Changing Acculturation Patterns in the United States and Implications for the Hospitality Industry

ABSTRACT Recent advances in acculturation research are employed as the conceptual and empirical foundation for a discussion of the human resource diversity currently experienced by the hospitality industry in the United States. Based on those theoretical underpinnings, propositions are offered that identify contributing forces behind the shift from a melting pot society to a multi-cultural society. In addition, implications for managing a multi-cultural hospitality workforce are explicated.

DOES RACE MATTER WITHIN A MULTICULTURAL CONTEXT? ALTERNATE MODES OF THEORIZING AND THEORY TESTING.

Within a set of multicultural organizations, we conduct a firm level six-year, longitudinal analysis on the direct impact that racial diversity in human resources has on financial performance. Cons...

Ethnicity and human resource management practice in sub-Saharan Africa: the relevance of the managing diversity discourse

The paper explores issues of human resource diversity in the multi-ethnic societies of sub-Saharan Africa, arguing that ethnicity constitutes a primary dimension of diversity. The influence of ethnicity on employment relations in organizational life in this region is examined and whether the discourse of managing diversity could be applied to manage such diversity. The paper argues that, if the ethnic diversity found in African organizations is well managed, this could enhance organizational harmony and effectiveness. Further, if organizations in Africa deliberately embrace approaches of 'inclusion' rather than 'exclusion' in managing their human resource and appreciate the inherent employee 'difference', it could improve the image and effectiveness of organizations operating here. At the same time, there is a need to adapt such approaches to the cultural specificity of local contexts.

Securing Diversity in Human Resources: Lessons from Malaysia

(2001). Securing Diversity in Human Resources: Lessons from Malaysia. Asia Pacific Business Review: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 63-79.

Problems to agricultural sustainability in developing countries and a potential solution: diversity

Problems addressed, in reporting from relevant sources, include population pressure, subsistence agriculture, rural poverty, natural resource depletion with emphasis on deforestation, land degradation, decline in productivity, resource rich/urban biased policies, and gender disparities. Compounded, these problems, which if isolated already pose tough challenges, seem to form an insurmountable barrier in the development path toward sustainable agriculture. Efforts made so far have had impacts below expectations. Recognizing biodiversity as the key stepping stone, the proposition is outlined that prospects will be improved significantly through the recognition of the great potential of diversity in human and technical resources as well. Needed are in‐depth research and thorough multidimensional analyses, to formulate an alternative strategy geared to mobilize the synergy yet hidden in the potential of the three‐pronged resource diversity.