Making Differences Matter: A New Paradigm for Managing Diversity (HBR OnPoint Enhanced Edition)

This is an enhanced edition of HBR article 96510, originally published in September 1996. HBR OnPoint articles include the full-text HBR article, plus a synopsis and annotated bibliography. Diversity efforts in the workplace have been undertaken with great goodwill, but, ironically, they often end up fueling tensions. They rarely spur the leaps in organizational effectiveness that are possible. Two paradigms for diversity are responsible, but a new third paradigm is showing it can address the problem. Leaders in third-paradigm companies are proactive about learning from diversity; they encourage people to make explicit use of cultural experience at work; they fight all forms of dominance and subordination, including those generated by one functional group acting superior to another; and they ensure that the inevitable tensions that come from a genuine effort to make way for diversity are acknowledged and resolved with sensitivity.