Ethics and Diversity Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Ethics and Diversity - Essay Example Prior to that, all of the Equal Pay Act (1970), the Sex Discrimination Act (1975), the Race Relations Act (1976) and the Race Relations Amendment Act (2000), sought to ensure against both direct and indirect discrimination in the provision of goods and services and within the workplace. From the legal standpoint, therefore, diversity is obligatory. Legislature and regulations aside, the question is whether or not firms have an ethical duty to embrace workforce diversity and to ensure that they have a diverse workforce. While some scholars have argued that workforce diversity cannot be defined as an ethical obligation insofar as it could lead to the hiring of less qualified candidates simply because of their race, religion, or ethnicity, among others (Darr, 2002), other scholars maintain that it is an ethical obligation (Ludlum and Mascaloinov, 2004). Pending the presentation of a brief understanding of the implications of diversity and a review of the argument against it as an ethical obligation, the present research will argue in favour of workforce diversity as an ethical responsibility towards which all firms must aspire. The concept of diversity is an all-inclusive one and, refers to the collectivity of human differences and similarities along a given dimension (Cox, 1993). As pertains to a workforce, Caudron and Hayes (1997) maintain that both dimensions and measures of diversity include socioeconomic and psychographic characteristics, race, cultural and ethnic heritage, religion and belief systems, gender and sexual preferences and, age. Other significant dimensions and measures of diversity, although lesser appreciated and researched in relation to intra-organisational relations and dynamics, are political affiliations and socioeconomic and functional backgrounds (Gordon, 1995; Caudron and Hayes, 1997; Stockdale and Crosby, 2003; Gardenswartz , 2003; Barak, 2005). Arguing the above definition to be unjustifiably expansive, some researchers have called for a more precise focus on a particular set of diversity dimensions and measures. These are race, culture, gender, religion, and ethnicity. Indeed, by expanding the parameters of diversity to include age and sexual preferences, attention has been deflected from the more seminal of the diversity categories, chief amongst which are race and ethnicity (Cox, Lobel and McLeod, 1991; Polzer, Milton and Swann, 2002; Arrendondo, 2004; Squires, 2005; Ocon, 2006). It is in relation to the more seminal of these differences that scholars have argued the ethics of their implementation. 3 Suspect Ethics As earlier noted some scholars have disputed the ethics of workforce diversity and contend that its identification as an objective contradicts a firm's ethical obligation to hire employees on the basis of merit, qualifications and potential. The aforementioned criteria for candidate selection is nothing short of an ethical obligation which firms owe their stakeholders, job candidates, society and the economy at large (Mujtaba, 2006). As per the stated argument, firms owe their stakeholders, not to mention the economies within which they operate, a duty to perform in accordance with best practices guidelines. It further owes job candidates an ethical duty to acknowledge the more meritorious and qualified among them. When diversity becomes the objective, candidates are not selected according to merit and,