Dilemmas Of Diversity: A New Paradigm of Integrating Diversity¹

1. This article is based on a benchmark survey of global organizations and their approaches to diversity spearheaded by the authors for Trompenaars Hampden-Turner. Forty-six organizations—twenty American, seventeen European, and one Asian—responded. The survey indicates how far these organizations have traveled from their initial realization of diversity to the challenges they still face in their organizations. This article starts with a summary of the findings from the diversity survey, integrates data from open-ended interviews that we conducted and moves toward recommendations on how to integrate diversity. We need to approach diversity as a value using a different paradigm from that normally applied.

Abstract

This article frames diversity and recommends that it be reconciled with contrasting values. Diversity cannot stand by itself. At its most abstract level, diversity can be seen to be on a continuum with unity or with sameness and for diversity to become meaningful, these dilemmas must be reconciled, so that, for example, we are diverse in our expressions but the same in our rights to express that diversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Bay Area
• business start-ups
• Confucian values
• dilemma
• Economic Development Board (EDB)
• eco-system
• emotional intelligence
• entrepreneurship
• erring
• family atmosphere
• idealism—realism
• Hawthorne effect
• Helix
• intellect—experience
• Kauffman Foundation
• level playing field
• modelling innovation
• Nanyang Technological University (NTU)
• Nanyang Technopreneurship Centre
• pathology zones
• reconciliation zones
• Seattle
• seriousness-play
• Silicon Valley
• Singapore
• three-dimension model
• TIP program

Notes

1. This article is based on a benchmark survey of global organizations and their approaches to diversity spearheaded by the authors for Trompenaars Hampden-Turner. Forty-six organizations—twenty American, seventeen European, and one Asian—responded. The survey indicates how far these organizations have traveled from their initial realization of diversity to the challenges they still face in their organizations. This article starts with a summary of the findings from the diversity survey, integrates data from open-ended interviews that we conducted and moves toward recommendations on how to integrate diversity. We need to approach diversity as a value using a different paradigm from that normally applied.

2. The concept of values as differences is common among social anthropologists, as argued in Bateson (2000).

3. The traffic light metaphor is used by Levi-Strauss (1979).

4. The methodology in its latest form appears in Hampden-Turner (2009).

5. Strategy emerging bottom-up is explored by Mintzberg (1989).