A conceptual approach to diversity management and diversity climate in organizations

The approach of ?diversity management? has been thought to become evident about 20 years ago in America. This approach promotes the idea that there can be an organization which consists of individuals who have different characteristics, such as culture, life style, knowledge, education, appearance, work experience, nationality, ethnicity, sexual and affectional orientation and who can work together in compliance and collaboration and this organization adds value and gain competitive advantage because of its differences. In a phrase, this approach aims to create advantage by managing diversity to employees and organizations because of both employees? and organizations? differences.Another concept related to diversity management approach which has become very popular in the last few years and been added to the literature is diversity climate. Diversity climate is defined as all of the perceptions about opportunities and difficulties that are created by organization for people who defined as ?different? in the organization. Diversity climate factors are included in detail in our thesis in order to describe diversity climate and make it meaningful in terms of theory.We cannot manage what we cannot measure nor describe. Therefore, diversity management is only possible if we can describe and dimension the differences and know how the differences that occur due to the dimensions of diversity are perceived by others. With this approach, the first part of this thesis first of all examines the concept of diversity, the description of diversity and the scope of diversity in detail. We then look at and examine the dimensions of diversity, the classification of those dimensions in terms of the ?factor approaches?, the approaches about diversity, socio-psychological theories that provide the base of the concept of the diversity, the classification of organizations due to diversity perceptions, the concept and the scope of diversity management, history of the diversity management approach and principal approaches which are related to diversity management.The second part of the thesis examines diversity climate. This part includes concept, description and scope of diversity climate, diversity climate factors, models and theories of diversity climate, measurement of diversity climate and improvement tools for diversity climate.