Does employees’ diversity affect organizational performance? A review of papers

Abstract

Nowadays, many organizations have been relying on group or team work to achieve organizational goals. In a group or team, the employees are diverse due to different background, such as education level, gender, races, as well as ages. Although group members might be diverse, an effective group could be developed by sharing mutual objectives and visions to reach optimum results in organizations. Employees' diversity has been a human resource challenge that could not be avoided. It is known as a challenge in human resource field because employees with different backgrounds could have different ways in dealing matters in organizations. The differences or diversity among employees could be a barrier in the process of task accomplishment. Hence, the understanding of the linkage between employees' diversity and organizational performance is essential in the literature of human resource management. However, it was claimed that the direct linkage between employees' diversity and organizational performance has been questioned and remained unclear. Hence, the past studies that investigated the relationship between employees' diversity and organizational performance among employees are important for this review paper. This review writing involved the articles that are ranged from 2008 to 2018, which is a decade. From the past studies, it was found that the relationship between employees' diversity and organizational performance among employees is inconsistent. Some studies revealed significant relationship, while other studies claimed that there is non-significant relationship between the variables. The inconsistency of findings has caused ambiguity to the linkage between the variables. Due to the inconsistency of findings, it is recommended that future studies should conduct more studies about the relationship between employees' diversity and organizational performance among corporate personnel. Future studies are also suggested to conduct their studies in longitudinal form in order to capture the trend of changes throughout their research.