Workforce diversity and causality in organizations:Research of a foreign funded bank

Workforce diversity emerged at late 90's and became a more popular concept with the continuous change of expectations. The corporates inevitably changed their management styles, increased their expectations and started to be more dynamic with all these changes including the diversification of demographic characteristics. My objective of research is to understand if workforce diversity can be strictly used at organizations or corporations. With this regard, I targeted banking business, which is the major part of the financial sector. The sample bank chosen is a young, dynamic, foreign funded bank operating in Turkey. The research includes several face-to-face interviews with the bank managers in order to understand what kind of work and management styles are being used to survive in a system where expectations are continuously changing. Survey was conducted in all of the branches of the bank in Ankara with a total of 156 bank employees. This thesis study consists of four sections. The first one consist the conceptual dimensions and causes of workforce diversity. The second section is about diversity management and the depending strategies. The third section explains the measuring methods of workforce diversity. The last section of the thesis expresses the overall evaluation and the results of the research. The research results show that the subject bank did not utilize workforce diversity; but still succeeded to grow and increased its competitiveness. Keywords: diversity, workforce diversity, diversity management IV