Dimensions of Workforce Diversity: A Conceptual Study

Workforce is defined as a group of people who work for a particular organization or business and today diversity has been identified as one of the key factor for sustaining competitive advantage. Organizations are experiencing success through diversified work culture by identifying innovated ways of problem solving and facing challenges. Management practices usually refer to the working methods and innovations that managers use to improve the effectiveness of work systems. Common management practices include: empowering staff, training staff, introducing schemes for improving quality, and introducing various forms of new technology. It is an entity of instruments to support implementation of concepts and ideas at all levels of conceptualization and realization of concepts, ultimately aiming to support organizational processes. The main purpose of this study is to understand managerial practices as part of human resources practices for managing workforce diversity. The study is done with various aspects of diversity and human resources management. In general, workforce diversity includes gender, age, religion, race, education or it is heterogeneity with mix of people, where every person is different from another. In this era of globalization, the organizations are far more varied in its composition than ever before. So dimensions like gender, age, religion, race, are not enough to study workforce diversity management. Several other dimensions are added like sexual orientation, disability (mental or physical), beliefs, attitudes, values, emotions, personality, lifestyle, family background, caste, economic class, work style and many more in different researches. It is also observed that a well managed diverse organization can easily sustain, on the other hand an unmanaged and chaotic organization is not able to sustain in competitive environment. The organizations must involve the best practices to manage workforce diversity, e. g. top leadership commitment, diversity linked to performance, measurement (qualitative and quantitative), accountability, succession planning, diversity training etc. The purpose of this study to understand different dimensions of workforce diversity as it is in form of visible and invisible.