Through the strategic deployment of a diverse workforce, organizations seek to
achieve competitive advantage (Storey 1995). There are a range of objectives
organizations wish to achieve through effective HR diversity management. At the top is
compliance with legal EEO and AA requirements. Other objectives include mainly
creativity, flexibility, employee attraction, employee retention and better marketing
capabilities. Through effective diversity management, diverse teams aim at achieving
greater innovation and creativity, enabling them to outperform homogenous teams
(Cox and Blake 1991; Richard 2000). While there is evidence that short-term progress is
affected by conflict and communication problems, by bringing a wider range of
perspectives to problem solving, diverse teams foster speed and innovation and produce
substantially higher quality solutions over whole development cycles. Moreover, by
bringing equality to employment relations, organizations tend to attract and retain an
adequate and qualified workforce. Cox and Blake (1991) argued that the benefits of
effective diversity management include reducing turnover, absenteeism and attracting the
best candidates as the labour market shrinks. Past research indicates that those individuals
who belong to the ‘dominant’ group within an organization tend to have higher job
satisfaction and commitment as they experience higher co-worker support, superior
rewards, access to adequate resources, and greater autonomy (Kossek et al. 2005). For
those outside the dominant group within an organization, job satisfaction can be lower, particularly where they do not have access to equal rewards or advancement opportunities. In addition, tendencies for people to form in-groups and out-groups can affect job satisfaction, and impinge on supervisor, subordinate and co-worker relations. Furthermore, by making use of workforce diversity, many organizations seek to improve marketing capabilities to reflect and to be more responsive to customer demographic change (Cox and Blake 1991).