Organizational culture impacts on diversity management: A research on hotels

Diversity and how to manage diversity have become a hot topic in social sciences in recent years. It is a multi-disciplinary problem and being discussed in the domains namely, sociology, anthropology, and managerial sciences. The managing diversity phenomenon traced back to 1960's due to ethical and legal concerns then in 1990's taken into consideration by strategic human resources to obtain benefits from diversified workforce. Workforce diversity has become an important issue in developed countries, particularly those considered multicultural in nature. Due to global demographics, there is a tendency to focus directly on cultural and demographic diversity compositions of the workforce, especially in multinational organizations (MNEs). It is known that the success of any application relies on several factors according to the structure and functioning of an organization both in human resource management and ?particularly- in diversity management. In relevant literature, specifically in the theoretical models, it is implied that the success of diversity management only can be provided with a coherent organizational culture. Besides that, another factor has an effect on diversity management is the perceptions of employees of a given organization related to diversity management. Thus, a research model is provided to propose that organizational culture has an impact on diversity management perceptions. There are two data sets in the research. The independent variable of the study is organizational culture and the dependent variable of the study is diversity perceptions. The organizational culture consists of four dimensions which are involvement, consistency, adaptation, and mission; and the diversity management comprises three levels: individual, group, and organization. In the research, quantitative method is applied and the data is gathered by questionnaire technique. The sampling consisted of a hotel chain and the data collected from 285 respondents was conducted using the SPSS software program and LISREL. The research concluded that the mission dimension of the organizational culture has impacts on both individual, group and organization levels; the consistency dimension has impacts on individual and organization levels; and the adaptation dimension has an impact on organizational level. When the research results evaluated holistically, parallel to the literature, it is found that organizational culture has an impact on diversity management. In addition, the success of diversity management depends on the long term management programs and the commitment of management from top management to the lower management. Keywords: Organizational culture, diversity management, equal employment, positive discrimination, cross-cultural management.