Equal Opportunity in Employment of Diverse Work Groups: The Case of Iran

The primary aim of this chapter is to examine management of diversity and equality of opportunities in employment in Iran. HRM and diversity management (DM) specialists argue that equal opportunity (EO) practices help organisations capitalise on the benefits of a diverse workforce in terms of reducing turnover and absenteeism, attracting the best workers, increasing sales and marketing efforts, enhancing creativity and innovation, and improving decision making. While these benefits might be true in the context of developed countries, we are critical of their existence in the context of less-developed nations such as Iran. Furthermore, while in a majority of pervious research on managing diversity the perspective of managers who had policy-making roles in the organisation dominated the analysis, our study tackles this limitation and advances understanding by providing multiple perspectives on diversity and EO in employment to encompass both managers and workers’ views. The study is based on 76 semi-structured interviews across two industries (construction and manufacturing) with both managers and blue-collar workers. Our findings suggest that, in contrast to existing theories, economic evaluations such as cost-minimisation of the diverse work groups to be the major driving force behind adopting EO practices in employment. Interestingly, our data suggested that such cost-benefit relationship was also seen to be beneficial to the workers. Based on the analyses, we highlight the basic characteristics of managing diversity and equality of opportunity practices,their interconnections and the resultant implications

Keywords:

diversity management , human resource management , case study , Iran