Manage Resistance to Change Proactively

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Managing diversity using a strategic planned change approach
Earnest Friday
Management in the College of Business Administration, Florida International University, Miami, Florida, USA, and

Managing diversity

863
Received October 2002 Revised February 2003 Accepted February 2003

Shawnta S. Friday
School of Business and Industry at Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA
Keywords Diversity management, Strategic management, Change management Abstract Many organizations have implemented various types of initiatives within the last few decades in an effort to deal with diversity. A possible missing vinculum (link) between how an organization deals with diversity and its impact on the bottomline is a corporate diversity strategy that is executed using a planned change approach to systemically manage diversity. While many organizations have implemented a corporate diversity strategy, most have not used a “planned change-corporate diversity strategy”. The lack of a “planned change-corporate diversity strategy” is quite likely to inhibit managing diversity from becoming systemic to an organization’s culture and its way of doing business, thus tending to disallow the potential benefits of diversity to be maximized. Hence, this paper offers a framework for using a “planned change-corporate diversity strategy” to: progress along the “diversity continuum” starting with acknowledging to valuing, and ultimately to managing diversity; and systemically managing diversity using a eight-step “managing diversity process”.

Introduction Over the past few decades, academicians, practitioners and organizational researchers have recognized that diversity is a phenomenon that has a wide array of affects within the workplace, and society

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