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Home > Diversity in the Workplace
We are all different and yet similar in many ways. The personality typology of Carl Jung is a beautiful structure for seeing such similarities and differences. Understanding our diversity points the way to the constructive uses of our differences.
Isabel Myers and her mother Katharine Briggs elaborated Jung's ideas, and Myers
started the development of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).
It is a simple-to-use psychometric questionnaire that can reliably
determine a person's natural personality type. Myers' goal was
to help people to be happy and effective in whatever they chose
to do.
Benefits of Diversity
Human diversity is a fact which brings many benefits to any organisation that fully embraces it.
Most people want to do their best. They want their contributions recognised, appreciated, and rightly rewarded. They desire to be happy and productive. They want others to understand their ideas and concerns, and see the reasons for their decisions.
People feel stressed and hurt in the absence of the above. They cannot, and probably will not, maximise their potential and self-manage to perform. Ultimately, the organisation will lose talented people. Those who stay may find themselves in ill-suited roles that increase the likelihood of personal failure.
An organisation that welcomes diversity brings excitement, reward and opportunities to all. It will see more and better options in facing changes, because there is breadth, depth, balance, and creativity in its perspectives. It stays competitive in turbulent times.
Diversity changes how we learn. We learn when others stretch our ways of thinking. We don't learn anything if everyone works the same way. We learn when we see new ways of communicating or doing things, or different reasoning behind conclusions and decisions. We learn when experiencing creativity in action.
Conformity against Diversity
Conformity is the biggest obstacle to building diversity in the society or any organisation. Diversity fails to enrich an organisation if any group dominates. Position, status, opportunities, and rewards may be rigged to stream to the dominant group. Type begets type. The dominant group will only grow bigger and more powerful.
The conformist organisation has no richness, no flexibility, and no capacity for change. It may develop major blind spots. It may resist even when diversity occurs naturally, and may be incapable of dealing with it productively.
Building Diversity
The mature organisation strives to include skilled practitioners of all functions--sensing, intuition, thinking, and feeling. It builds trust and a culture of acceptance where people are safe to learn and contribute. It creates an effective multichannel communication infrastructure which facilitates and encourages authentic and rich diversity of responses.
"Any team, therefore, should include a sufficient variety of types to perform the required jobs effectively and with satisfaction... disagreements are natural: Opposite kinds of perception make people see different aspects of a situation, and opposite kinds of judgement direct action toward different ends...
Moral and effectiveness will survive intact if the members of the team recognise that both kinds of perception and both kinds of judgement are essential to a sound solution of a problem. The prescription for individually solving a problem is to exercise all four processes in succession: sensing to establish all the facts, intuition to suggest all the possible solutions, thinking to determine the probable consequences of each course of action, feeling to weigh the desirability of each outcome in human terms. An individual is handicapped in doing this because the less-liked perception and judgement are relatively immature and therefore not as helpful as they might be, but a well-balanced team of individuals should include at least one skilled representative of each process."
Myers, Isabel Briggs, & Myers, Peter B. (1993, p.163). Gifts
Differing: Understanding Personality Type. Palo Alto, California:
Consulting Psychologists Press
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