Effects of Workplace Diversity Programs on Firms and Employees

Workplace Diversity
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Workplace Diversity
Introduction
Workplaces host various people whose primary goals are often to achieve the objectives of the company they work for. This is the anchor f workplace diversity. Diversity involves having people from different social and ethnic backgrounds who belong to different genders and social orientations. The diversity in workplaces is evident because companies hire people from different backgrounds. However, achieving workplace diversity can be challenging because of human judgement during human resource hiring. This necessitates interventions in workplace diversity programs. According to Leslie (2020), workplace diversity refers to practices and policies to improve target groups' workplace experiences and outcomes. These programs mostly target vulnerable and underrepresented groups like women, youths, racial and ethnic minorities, and other groups that may be disadvantaged.
Workplace diversity programs can take various forms. The first is non-discriminatory policies like training employees in implicit bias and emphasizing merit as the basis for pay and promotions. The second is initiatives that support target groups, like diversity mentoring. The third workplace diversity program that companies can implement involves accountability programs like reporting systems for discrimination or hiring chief diversity personnel (Leslie, 2020). These programs work together to ensure workplace inclusivity and diversity by bringing together people from different backgrounds to work together.
However, the greatest concern is why companies have developed an increasing urge for workplace diversity. It is a trend worth researching to determine the dynamism in business that has necessitated workplace diversity. Therefore this article investigates this trend. It explores the reasons for the increase in company adoption of workplace diversity programs, their pros and cons and how to enhance workplace diversity. It narrows down the findings to the impact of workplace diversity on employees and firms. This article reviews past literature, records the findings and uses it to make an informed argument on the impact of workplace diversity for firms and employees, the limitation of the findings and practical implications. The research question for the study is, "What are the effects of workplace diversity programs on firms and employees?"
Literature Review and Findings
Workplace diversity is a relatively new scenario in the business sector. However, scholars have researched it extensively; others covered it positively, while others approached it negatively. Dover et al. (2020) investigated the unintended effects of workplace diversity initiatives. They reviewed the social psychological evidence indicating that diversity programs sometimes lead to unintended impacts through the communication of fairness, inclusion and competence signals. According to Dover et al. (2020), workplace diversity initiatives favor the under-represented population and expose the overrepresented groups to discrimination. Discrimination, in this case, happens when they are restricted or denied opportunities to give way to under-represented groups. As a resul...