Diversity in the Workforce

This paper explores the various ways in which a diverse workforce may contribute to innovation in an organization. This exploratory paper will present the theoretical foundation that this study is based upon, the definitions of innovation and diversity and the results of existing research on whether a diverse workforce contributes to the innovation of an organization. Finally, testable propositions will be developed for further investigation. The changes in our world indicate that a diverse workforce is beneficial to any organization (Gomez-Mejia, Balkin, Cardy, 2007). This occurrence is partially due to businesses becoming more global in order to capture a share of the market. After the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Affirmative Action and subsequent changes to Equal Employment Laws, the realization was that these laws forced compliance, but businesses realized that to remain innovative, the embracement of diversity was important for organizations and the economy of a country (Sohail, et al., 2011). The Hudson report (Carrell, Tracey, & Sigler, 2006; Noe, Hollenbeck, Gerhart, & Wright, 2010) states 75% to 85% of those entering the workforce in the United States after 2000 would be minorities. Diversity has the potential to be highly advantageous to organizations. For example, Pelled, Eisenhardt and Xin (1999) contend “the knowledge-based view and decision-making perspectives have been used to suggest that diversity promotes creativity and improves decision-making effectiveness, and hence, lead to superior performance” (Richard, Murthi, Ismail, 2007, p. 1214). Diversity has also been tied to several other performance indicators in organizations including sustainability (Cox, Lobel, and McLeod, 1991), and productivity (Barta, Kleiner, and Neumann, 2012) who report that there is a direct correlation between a diverse workforce and productivity. Ilmakunnas and Ilmakunnas (2011) also studied the effect of diversity’ on productivity and contend that individual creativity and frequency of communication of a diverse workforce contributed to productivity. The collective combination of knowledge within organizations stems from the diversity of human capital. The shared experiences, training and racial/cultural diverse human capital contributes to innovation which has positive results on productivity within organizations (Okoro & Washington, 2012). In this paper, the relationship between diversity and innovation in organizations is of interest. While several authors (for example Skarzynski and Gibson (2008); Sohail, et al., (2011); Richard (2000, 2003); Hoffman (1985) ) have argued that diversity has positive effects on innovation, others (for example (Carrell, Mann, and Sigler, 2006; Jayne & Dipboye, 2004; Simons & Rowland, 2011) have argued otherwise. 1 Faculty, Grand Canyon University, USA. E-mail: shudson02@my.gcu.edu 74 Journal of Education and Human Development, Vol. 3(4), December 2014 In this paper, I review diversity and the theoretical concepts related to diversity, and then propose several testable propositions to investigate the relationship between those concepts and innovation within organizations.