Diversity makes the world beautiful and adventurous if you ask me. Imagine a world where everyone is the same; color, language, physical characteristics.. name it all. Of course such world will be boring and will not be enthusiastic enough.
Diversity can be defined as similarities and differences among individuals. Diversity is what we experience daily in our interactions and socialization with others, of course, elements of diversity is always close to us, living with us. You will agree that people you relates with differs from us in many ways, some are different from us based on age differences, some based on educational qualifications or background and so much on like that.
Diversity can be in primary, secondary or tertiary dimension. Of course, diversity is often seen everywhere; in our home, schools, workplace and the society at large. Primary dimension of diversity takes into considerations the characteristics often assigned to us by birth, they are those characteristics we don't often have influences on. They include age, physical characteristics, ethnicity, gender, race. Etc. We can all see that this dimension of diversity often shows everywhere around us, we always see people who are older or younger than us. At times we also live in places that's not homogeneous in nature; that may consists of people of different races and color.
Even in the workplace, we have superiors both in age and educational qualifications, all these are dimensions in which diversity may emerge.
Secondary dimension of diversity may include culture, religion, marital status, educational background. Etc. This secondary dimension can be influenced by individuals to some extent. The tertiary dimension can also be seen as opinions, thoughts, attitudes, personality etc that differs among different people.
Can diversity affects a workplace positively or negatively?
Diversity is a double edged sword, it can either help or mar you. If diversity is well managed in the workplace, it can help to bring positive growth and progress to such organization. However diversity can also have bad consequences if it's not managed in the workplace most especially by the management of such workplace.
Diversity can help in better decision making in organizations. Because of the differences in people and their diverse thinking and opinion towards a fact, better decision making may be established as everyone defends their thoughts from different angles. The axiom, "Two heads are better than one" works much better in a diversified environment. Different people comes with different ideas which will eventually help in better and concrete decision making.
Diversity has to be managed effectively in the workplace so that it can help the workplace to grow. In an environment whereby there is undue favouritism to some specific group of people than the other employees, then diversity in such organization will bring forth bad fruits. Undue favouritism or racism in a workplace setting may bring incessant conflicts among workers, the most important is that there will always be division in such company and a divided environment cannot thrive. Consider a working place with blacks and whites working together. If the diversity present in such organization is not properly managed, there wouldn't be any organizational progress at all. That's why workers need to embrace the diversities and differences in their workplace in order to go higher.
The world has gone global and diversities in every aspects of life will be something inevitable. We just got to handle it in a positive way. Remember diversity can make us grow, or can mar us as well. It all depends on how we approach and embrace it.