Cultural diversity in the workplace is becoming more and more prevalent. Corporations in all industries are encouraging minorities, women, elderly workers, people with disabilities as well as foreign workers to join white males in the workplace. The following analysis will focus on these groups and how companies are encouraging them to join an ever-expanding workplace. Even if affirmative action is dismantled, diversity of the workforce is clearly here to stay. Business owners, managers, and experts say their goals will be to maintain or step up efforts to recruit and advance ethnic minorities in the year 2002 and beyond as noted in (Clifton, Williams, 2002). This is essentially because having a diverse work force and managing it effectively will simply be good business for all companies. This paper will focus on some of the facts that business will have to face in regards to diversifying there workforce as well as their management arena. Also, it will discuss that while our workforce is becoming more diverse, the upper and middle management of many companies are not. We have to remember that having a diversified workforce is not something a company should have, but is actually some thing that has happened or is soon going to happen due to the fact that we have a more diversified population. .
Defining Diversity.
One of the best definitions for diversity I have come across states, "Diversity is the mosaic of people who bring a variety of backgrounds, styles, perspectives, values, and beliefs as assets to the groups and organizations with which they interact" as explained by (Rasmussen, 1996). This definition has three noteworthy points. First, it describes diversity as a mosaic, which is different from the traditional label of a melting pot. A mosaic enables people to retain their individuality while contributing collectively to the bigger picture. Second, this definition of diversity applies to and includes everyone; it does not rule out anyone.
