Leveraging Intergenerational Diversity to Meet Business Goals

In recent years, the concept of generational diversity has gained increasing recognition in the United States. Each generation is shaped by historical, social, and cultural events that are unique to that particular age cohort. The purpose of this chapter is to help scholars, researchers, organizational leaders, practitioners, and graduate students understand diversity among generational cohorts and employ practices to utilize the wealth of knowledge that exists within today’s multigenerational workforce. This chapter will describe the four generations in today’s workplace and discuss gaps that can cause conflict. This chapter also provides tips and best practices for leveraging intergenerational diversity as well as scenarios and examples that demonstrate best practices. The result is a cohesive and productive workplace that respects multigenerational perspectives.

Leveraging Workforce Diversity in Practice

Important supply bases for buyers are those that emphasize minority-owned businesses. The increased focus on globalization, corporate social responsibility, supplier diversity, and additional benefits has established a need for buyers to develop sustainable relationships with minority-owned firms. Based on a review of the literature, and interviews with a minority supplier director, minority suppliers, and a purchasing manager, this chapter examines the relationship constructs that are important to buyer-minority-owned supplier relationships. Trust, perception of buyer’s commitment, and minority-owned supplier commitment is explored. Research propositions, implications, and directions for further research are offered.

Global Diversity Management Programs and Strategies at CEVA Logistics

The main Diversity and Inclusion activities of CEVA aim at increasing the participation of women at higher echelons of the management cadre, retaining diverse talent, and increasing the number of employees with disabilities. The diversity and integration understanding is the commitment to continuous improvement in every sub-region retaining the talented human capital with a focus on work and life balance initiatives and development by mentoring programs, network groups on the intranet, e-teams, and communities on gender and disability. Although diversity is integrated at CEVA at both the regional and global levels, the main motto in implementing the Diversity and Inclusion activities is “Think global, act local.”

Demographic Changes and Equal Employment Opportunity Legislation

This chapter reviews the relationship between a selection of United States federal laws and Human Resource Development (HRD). The chapter specifically reviews United States federal Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) laws related to race, gender, age, and national origin, discusses how the passage of these laws led to an increased diversity of the labor force, and demonstrates how utilizing this legislation can improve the research and practice of HRD. A comprehensive group of employment laws were passed between 1960 and 2000, and data from the U.S. Departments of Labor and Census indicate that these laws have served to substantially increase the percentage of minorities and women in the labor force. This increasing diversity requires practitioners to rethink the methods they use to deliver training and development programs to employees. In addition, researchers should examine how the increase in diversity impacts all areas of HRD, such as training, mentoring, and work-life balance.

Leveraging Age Diversity in Times of Demographic Change

With demographic change, organizations today are seeing changes in societal make-up translated to the composition of their workforce. In the future, younger and older employees will have to work together synergistically to achieve good performance. The authors argue that it will be largely up to leaders to prevent the negative effects of age diversity, i.e. social categorization and intergroup bias, and to facilitate the positive effects of age diversity, i.e. the sharing of unique knowledge resources held by young and old. The authors argue that certain leadership behaviors and especially their combinations have great promise in leading diverse teams, and highlight why they should be used in conjunction with positive beliefs about diversity.

Managing Privilege as a Key to Inclusive Leadership

The field of diversity and inclusion has experienced exponential growth over last 30 years. Yet, while these progressions have occurred, many of the core diversity and inclusion concepts have remained fairly stagnant. One critical example is around the concept of privilege. All of us find ourselves privileged in some way, but leaders in particular need to recognize and manage privilege to ensure inclusion in the workplace. Through personal examples and real stories, this chapter highlights the many positive outcomes leaders will experience by effectively managing privilege. These powerful outcomes include areas such as personal growth and effectiveness, more authentic relationships, increased levels of respect, expanded circle of influence, and maximized employee performance. To conclude, the authors look at the stages leaders go through before they are able to effectively manage this expanded view of privilege. These stages can be described as bliss, awareness, overprotection, enlightened, and ultimately managing privilege.

A Collaborative Inquiry

This chapter describes a Collaborative Inquiry (CI) process as experienced by six diverse female participants in a doctoral program. The focus of the inquiry was to deepen individual and group cross-cultural understanding, and to show how holistic learning can be promoted through integrating multiple ways of knowing and spirituality within a multicultural context. The purpose of this chapter is to provide the readers with sufficient information to apply CI in their practice and build on the research presented here. To meet this goal, the authors describe how CI has the potential to foster transformational learning and discuss the relationship between transformational learning, informational learning, global competencies, developmental capacity, and the paradoxical nature of diversity work. Lastly, the chapter ends with recommendations for creating a CI process that supports deep learning and change, and potential topics for future research.

Theorizing African American Women’s Learning and Development

This study is a qualitative, interpretative examination of nine African American women’s encounters with race, gender, and social class (intersectionality) in predominantly white organizations and the learning experiences that emerged from these encounters. Rather than continuing to operate from a Eurocentric view of learning, this study contributes to the scholarly discussion the learning perspectives of African American Women (AAW). Black feminist theory is used as a socio-cultural framework to explain how AAW learn from issues emerging from intersectionality. A narrative approach to inquiry was the research strategy employed. Three major learning orientations emerged from the women’s narratives: learning from influential sources, learning through divine guidance, and learning through affirmation of self. The authors contend that expanding the conversation of adult learning theories to include socio-cultural theories derived from black women’s scholarship may be necessary to move the field of adult education toward more inclusive ways of theorizing adult learning. Implications for the field of adult education and the emerging workforce diversity paradigm are provided.

Leveraging Sexual Orientation Workforce Diversity through Identity Deployment

Disclosure decisions for lesbian and gay employees have been researched in organizational contexts. While the dilemmas associated, factors affecting, and situations encouraging or discouraging disclosure have been studied, the relatively unexplored area is how homosexuality can be strategically deployed at workplace to contest the associated stigma and bring positive social and political changes in the organizational climate. While scholars believe that remaining closeted may be the best strategy in a heterosexist and homophobic environment, studies report psychological strain, lack of authenticity, behavioral dilemmas, etc. experienced by closeted individuals, which, at minimum, lead to conflicts in daily situations of identity management and, at the peak, suicidal attempts due to perceived burdensomeness and failed belongingness. To address this dilemma in leveraging sexual orientation diversity in workplaces, this chapter deals with the framework of identity deployment offered by Bernstein (1997) to explore how homosexuality can be deployed in the workplace.

Training and Development

As the world becomes smaller through globalization and the definition of diversity expands to accommodate new dimensions, it becomes increasingly important to identify and measure these changes and interpret how they influence strategic decision-making within organizations. To achieve an organization’s stated goals, it is not only important to recognize this diversity, but also build programs to incorporate the benefits of diversity while minimizing any negative aspects associated with this construct. Sharing case studies of best practices will highlight successes that can be used as models for those organizations that are addressing their training needs in the area of organizational diversity. This chapter will share tools designed to help organizations evaluate their needs in terms of diversity training and development. These resources can help training and development professionals identify needs, design curriculum, create evaluation tools for assessment, and evaluate costs to deploy strategic training and development programs.