Managing Diversity in Corporate America

Download or read book Managing Diversity in Corporate America written by Jefferson P. Marquis and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2007 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Managing diversity has become a primary concern of top U.S. corporations. In this paper, the authors develop a fact-based approach to modeling diversity management. They use the model to determine whether diversity-friendly corporations really do stand out from other companies by analyzing the strategies pursued by 14 large U.S. companies recognized for their diversity or human resource (HR) achievements. Finally, to understand whether best practices alone make a company diversity-friendly, they compare a number of characteristics of best diversity companies, best HR companies, and other companies, using quantitative and qualitative methods. They find that firms recognized for diversity are distinguished by a core set of motives and practices that resemble those presented in the best-practices literature, but that best practices per se may not enable a company to achieve a high level of diversity. Contextual factors, such as industry affiliation and company size, may be as significant as strategic factors in influencing the extent of a company's diversity.