University of Georgia

Terry College of Business
 

Corporate and high-level government interest in diversity management policies has been rising rapidly. For fees ranging from about $3,000 (for a one-day workshop) to more than $200,000 (for a complete cultural overhaul), diversity consultants offer to create workplace conductive to retaining and promoting culturally diverse employees.

Testimonials abound, even though there is little systematic evidence to demonstrate long-term results. Diversity workshops may impart cultural sensitivity, but they can also generate alienation or bitter, lasting divisions. One sure benefit is that sponsoring such programs shows that the employer is "doing something" about diversity - a savvy legal precaution as sexual harassment charges proliferate and with the labor Department's "Glass Ceiling Initiative" push for promotion and retention of female and minority employees.

Managing diversity is no fad; the various programs from a powerful ideological machine that would extend proportional representation and Multiculturalism far into personnel practices. The policies target "invisible" institutional racism and sexism and the allegedly monolithic white-male corporate culture. Managers are urged to "value differences," and gain greater productivity by letting women, immigrants and minorities "be themselves."

The recession has had minimal impact on diversity management's momentum. Late May's Second Annual Diversity Conference in Washington, D.C., was even more successful than last year's session. Consultants and policy experts joined individuals and groups sent from more than 60 corporations, 23 federal agencies and dozens of smaller employers.

A 1990 Towers-Perrin/Hudson Institute survey of 645 organizations found that the overwhelming majority of surveyed firms were concerned about work force diversity and many were already grappling with the reality. Forty-two percent took special steps to recruit minorities, 29% trained managers to value diversity, 12% trained minorities for supervisory positions and 10% had begun mentoring programs. (Fifty percent of utility companies provided diversity training to managers.) A 1991 follow-up survey found that the number of existing or planned programs aimed at dealing with work force change has doubled or even tripled.

In selling their programs, diversity consultants usually mute multiculturalism. Instead, they stress "dollars and demographics." Successful businesses, it is argued, will anticipate and capitalize on the swiftly rising proportion of minority, immigrant and female workers - Hispanic workers will be more in tune with Hispanic workers will be more in tune with Hispanic consumers. Asian managers will better manage Asian workers, etc. ("We've got to get right with the future!" urges Miami Herald Publisher David Lawrence, a corporate convert).

Besides the ubiquitous "valuing differences" workshops, managing diversity has spawned several additional strategies: Digirtal, Hughes, Du Pont, Avon and several other corporations have mad work force diversity an explicit corporate goal, Hughes has a vice president, work force diversity, and Motorola has a director, human resources diversity. Corporations may establish diversity goals for all levels of the organizations - such as Xerox's Balanced Workforce plan. Prudential Insurance is one of several corporations that has linked exectuvies' performance evaluations (and/or bonuses) to their records on promoting female and minority employees. NYNEX is among those organizations that have surveyed employees ("cultural assessment") with an eye toward uncovering bias barriers.

Some consultants urge corporations to follow the lead of major universities, such as the University of Michigan and the University of California, to use set-aside, "targets of opportunity" positions to increase work force diversity. Many corporations have tried formal or informal mentoring and some have encouraged the formation of minority employee support groups - such as Security Pacific Bank's BOSS (Black Officers Support System), HON (Hispanic Officers Network) and SPAN (Security Pacific Asian Network). Digital inaugurated "core groups" to discuss diversity issues - led by employees who had graduated from two-day workshops nicknamed "Affirmative Action University."

Whatever the merits and legal risks of their methods, the diversity meisters' futurology is proving suspect. Projections of ballooning ethnic diversity and labor shortages are increasingly criticized as exaggerated or inaccurate. Assimilation continues to melt ethnic separatism. And, ironically, the very growth and success of diversity management is fostering internal conflicts.

One major rift results from efforts by "new breed" consultants to distance managing diversity from affirmative action's backward-looking, strident, social-work style. These tactics anger veterans with backgrounds in Equal Employment Opportunity enforcement. They bristled when diversity guru R. Roosevelt Thomas, addressing the Second National Diversity Conference, said that efforts should now focus upon educating managers and changing corporate culture. Critics fear Mr. Thomas will expand diversity's focus to include disability, generational styles, and work-family conflicts. (Sexual orientation is one dimension of "difference" gingerly approached or simply avoided by many market-wise consultants and nervous corporate clients).

Convention keynoter Lewis Griggs, producer of the huggely successful "Valuing Diversity" training videos, sparked debate in my convention focus group over whether white males should do diversity training. On the other hand, political correctness posits that only minorities and women know "what it is like" to be members of oppressed groups: therefore, women and minorities are best suited to do "diversity work." On the hand, there were objections that a field already bereft of white males may be devalued as yet another interest-group ghetto.

White employee resistance to diversity management was much discussed at the National Diversity Conference, and "defensiveness, resistance, backlash, scapegoating" emerged as a top problem area in a recent Cultural Diversity at Work newsletter survey.

Many consultants would like to expand the diversity agenda to include white males. But political correctness prevents diversity advocates from openly admitting that white hostility may result from reverse discrimination and that, therefore, whites may have good reason to suspect more calls for diversity-tuned "fair treatment, not equal treatment." And everyone should recognize the dangers in arguing that an individual's educational and occupational opportunities should be based upon the projected growth of his ethnic group - or his ethnic "fit" with employees or customers.

Still, be prepared to hear that hiring or promoting an Hispanic because he is Hispanic is not discrimination against non-Hispanics. In an ironic twist to the 1991 Civil Rights Act, "selecting for diversity" may be pitched as "business necessity."

Mr. Lynch is a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College and the author of "invisible Victim: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action" (Praeger Paperbacks, 1991).