Diversity and Demographic Characteristics

Diversity and Demographic Characteristics

MGT/331 Organizational Behavior

October 31, 2005

Diversity and Demographic Characteristics

Throughout this paper I will describe and analyze to some degree, diversity, and demographic characteristics with an emphasis on the following behaviors:

* Gender

* Age, as it relates to the use of technology

* Differences in skills and abilities

* Personality traits

Employee demographics, as stated by Chuang, Joshi, & Liao, (2004) "in terms of tenure, age, gender, and ethnicity has been found to predict turnover, commitment and integration, relationships with peers, altruism, organization based self-esteem and task performance." What does this mean one asks? Well, let's discover by starting with Gender.

When considering the behavior of gender according to Klenke, (2003) "Strategic decision making is affected by power which in turn serves as a major foundation of organizational politics. To deal with many situations effective conflict management is needed. How conflict is handled affects trust between the members of the organization. This process, and the decisions it involves, are affected by gender differences." Therefore, one can see the characteristic of different gender plays a role within the work environment. Let us take a closer look into gender characteristics.

Klenke (2003) continues with, "Sex role congruence means that jobs are consistent with male/female stereotyping of occupations. For example, until recently we had policeman because it was perceived as a man's work. Now we have police officers. Certain professions - engineering, aeronautics, are still very much male bastions because the SKAs (skills, knowledge and abilities) required for these jobs such as mathematical fluency or spatial abilities are competencies that women have traditionally been believed to lack."

"For men the path to power and leadership is straightforward: join the usual clubs, board of directors, civic associations, visible charities or national leadership groups; then leverage ties with financiers, power brokers, ranking politicians, competitor CEOs, opinion leaders, or potential venture partners to establish a power base. For women, on the other hand, access to power and executive leadership is less clearly defined and more limited."

"Research on women in management suggests that women show a greater concern for interpersonal relationships and a reliance on the rules of fairness in the exercise of power whereas men's power orientation is toward maximizing individual gains." Imagine that, an upper management relying on rules of fairness.

"Although considerable progress has been made over the past two decades in the advancement of women in organizations, in the executive suite women are still vastly underrepresented on top management team and corporate boards. " Maybe some of this is due to Harpaz and Snir's (Mar 2003) findings; "Married women worked fewer hours per week than unmarried women, while married men worked more hours per week than unmarried men."

Do these findings mean that a gender divers workforce is a healthy workforce? Or is it simply that society is growing up and embracing a realistic view of the world? Let's take a look at age as it relates to the use of technology in the workforce.

Technology has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few decades. The paper trails, are now email trails. As a young man entering the workforce, I quickly became aware that some of the more senior staff had not necessarily embraced email or computers in general. Believe it or not, there were employees who did not even read their email; their secretaries read it and provided the important details. Why is this? Let us look into Morris and Venkatesh 's findings.

Morris and Venkatesh conducted a study in which they introduced a new software system over a five month period to 118 employees, all varying ages. "The younger workers' technology usage decisions were more strongly influenced by attitude toward using the technology. In contrast, older workers were more strongly influenced by subjective norm and perceived behavioral control, although the effect of subjective norm diminished over time. These findings were robust, even after controlling for key confounding variables identified in prior organizational behavior research (i.e., income, occupation, and education levels)." (Morris and Venkatesh, 2000)

Morris and Venkatesh, (2000) continued with, "Specifically, in the short term, most factors outlined by theory of planned behavior are significant for both younger and older workers; however, the salience of each factor varies with age. Specifically, younger workers appear to be more driven by underlying attitudinal factors whereas older workers are more motivated by social and process factors. Over the long term, the contrasts were equally striking. After 3 months of experience with the system, older workers no longer placed significant emphasis on subjective norm; that is, they were no different than younger workers in this regard. Given current theoretical perspectives, this was not surprising-as noted earlier, we only expected subjective norm to have an influence on older workers' initial decision to use technology and that subjective norm would become non-significant with increasing experience (i.e., during measurement after 3 months of use) due to internalization of normative influences. The data suggests that the internalization process occurs quickly. In fact, in this case, 3 months was long enough for internalization to take place, rendering subjective norm non-significant for both groups at that point."

So what does all this mean? Is the use of technology vs. age just an ease of use issue? Well, Morris and Venkatesh, (2000) concluded with, "Younger workers are much more likely to have been exposed to information technology at a relatively early age perhaps as early as elementary school in some cases. This is much less likely for older employees because they would have completed high school (and in many cases, college) before the personal computer was commonplace.

Now lets move onto differences in skills and abilities.

"Regardless what area a person works in, some people just produce more than others. Especially in those fields where results can easily be tracked, such as in sales, managers can see this on a daily basis. In every