Diversity and Ethics in the Workplace

GCSE Business Studies

Diversity and Ethics

Running head: DIVERSITY AND ETHICS IN THE WORKPLACE

K.B.

MSU

Ethics 101

Tom

September 01, 2007

Diversity and Ethics in the Workplace

Diversity and Ethics have a profound effect on an organization’s staffing practices and selection of tools. Before you can understand how diversity and ethics have these effects, one must understand what diversity and ethics are.

Diversity

Diversity is the presence of individual differences, such as gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, and the ability to perform various tasks. An organization that completely values diversity will have management that makes diversity a priority and practices it. An effective manager can practice diversity by executing the following seven steps: focus on getting the best talent, develop career plans for all employees, provide career mentoring by diversity cohorts, promote minorities to responsible positions, maintain accountability for diversity goals, make diversity part of organizational strategy, and build diversity into senior management. Members of an organization that practices embracing diversity are skilled at working together despite of the difference of the employees (Schermerhorn, Hunt, & Osborn, 2005).

This is a preview of the whole essay

Since there is growth in the diversity of the labor force, there is a growth in the racial and ethnical terms surrounding it too. The fastest growing groups of people in the workforce are Hispanics, Asian, and other minorities. These groups are growing the fastest because of immigration and birthrates that are above the national average. The increase of women joining the workforce is on a rise as well. Since there is a large diversity in the work force, then the role of the Human Resources Manager (HRM) has an increase number of challenges (Noe, Hollenbeck, Gehart, Wright, 2004). A HRM needs to remain neutral at all times, setting aside their own believes and opinions. When hiring new staff a HRM cannot treat one applicant differently than another based on race or gender. For example, a Car Dealer named DCH Auto has only one female automotive technician on staff out of all seven of their dealerships. Seeing a woman as an automotive technician is rare since it is not a job field woman typically go into, therefore it is hard to find a woman to hire for that type of position. There is some ethnic diversity among the automotive technicians, the majorities are white (non-Hispanic) and Hispanic but there are other races as well. As for the other departments at DCH Auto, there is great diversity in the number of women as well as the number of minorities.

When training staff a HRM needs to consider the diversity of those who are being trained. Diversity training is training that is designed to change staff members’ attitudes about diversity and or develop skills needed to work in a diverse environment. Three main goals that a HRM wants employees to learn; 1.They should understand how their values and stereotypes influence their behavior towards others of different gender and ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds; 2. They should gain an appreciation of cultural difference among themselves; 3. They should avoid and correct behaviors that isolate and intimidate minority group members (Noe, Hollenbeck, Gehart, Wright, 2004).

Ethics

Ethics is defined as rules or standards governing the conduct of a person or the members of a profession, according to dictionary.com. Ethical behavior is that which is accepted as morally “good” and “right” verses what is “bad” or “wrong”. Agreeing on weather or not a certain action or decision is ethical is not always a simple issue (Schermerhorn, Hunt, & Osborn, 2005). Since ethics vary and can change, this causes trends in organizational behavior.

A human resource manager has the responsibility of not just treating all employees equally but also ensuring all employees are treated equally well. There are five basic rights that all people possess are; right of free consent, right of privacy, right of freedom of conscience, right of freedom of speech, and right to due process. There are situations where a company has the right of their employee affected. The right of privacy is one of the rights that takes a little more effort to protect. Since record keeping on computes is becoming the normal for many companies, keeping the records confidential is a challenge. If a people have access to these files could other files also be accessible. HRMs must keep all of their personnel records on a separate network. By having a separate network this helps to limit the number of people who have access to these records. Protecting employee’s rights is an important goal for the HRM (Noe, Hollenbeck, Gehart, Wright, 2004).

Diversity of the employees and the ethics of treating the employees fair go together. Both diversity and ethics are about doing what is good and right for everyone involved. This is not a carefree responsibility but one that requires a HRM to put aside their personal bias, feelings and beliefs in order to insure all the employees’ needs are met.