Diversity Paper

Diversity Paper

An organizations success depends on it workforce. A talented and diverse workforce lends the most opportunities for success within the organization. A diverse workforce will also impact the organizations individual human behavior. Human behavior is the collection of activities by human beings and culture, emotions, ethnicity, gender, age, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, religion, occupation, skills and abilities, personality traits, and values. This paper will discuss the impact that race and ethnicity, age, gender, and sexual orientation have on an individual's behavior.

Human behavior is impacted greatly by race and ethnicity. Human behavior can easily be affected by stereotypes, discrimination, and prejudices. As years pass by, conditions continue to improve in regards to stereotypes, discrimination, and prejudices, but ethnic groups continue to face issues of discrimination towards them. Racial profiling is still a practice used by our law enforcement especially following September 11th. "Fueled by the "War on Drugs" and the "War on Terror" that have given police a pretext to target people they think fit a "drug courier," "gang member," or "terrorist" profile." (http://www.aclu.org/racialjustice/racialprofiling/index.html) Is racial profiling real? Most Americans believe so. A July 2001 Gallop poll revealed that 55% of whites and 83% of blacks believe racial profiling is widespread. This practice isn't limited to inner cities and airports. Many affluent Americans from judges to athletes have endured racial profiling. Discrimination can be an inherent human behavior. These practices that are witnessed daily can't help but impacting an individual's behavior. Those behaviors will then transfer to the workplace and affect a person's relationship with a coworker. Therefore productivity will be affected negatively. The ACLU has launched a web-based campaign called Arrest Racism whose goal is to educate the public in hopes to eliminate the act of profiling based on skin color. Education is the greatest weapon in molding individual behavior towards race and ethnicity.

Many people believe that as a person ages, their skills, thought processing capacity, and fitness level diminishes to the point where their productivity drops. They, in turn, are perceived to be less valuable than their younger counterparts in the workplace. The age gap in the workplace can be vast. Ages can very from the teens all the way up to the sixties or even seventies. These age differences could be a source of prejudices and stereotypes. The United States government has admitted that workers over the age of forty are at risk of discrimination. According to the government website for equal opportunity (http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/age.htm), setting age limits for employees has become a common practice among employers. The government has created several acts which outlaw age discrimination. The 1967 Age Discrimination Act was created by congress to protect the rights of workers over the age of forty against workplace age discrimination. The ADEA states, "it is unlawful to discriminate against a person because of his/her age, with respect to any term, condition, or privilege of employment-including, but not limited to hiring, firing, promotion, layoff, compensation, benefits, job assignments, and training".(ADEA, 1967)

Gender differences also play a key role in impacting individual behavior by creating gender