Pride, prejudice and performance: relations between HRM, diversity and performance

Today, managing diversity is considered one of the main challenges for HRM in modern organizations. In this article, a framework is developed to suggest that the design and implementation of HRM activities should be in uenced by strategic choices on the management of diversity which are themselves shaped by environmental factors. The HRM activities lead to four types of outcomes (affective, cognitive, symbolic and communicative) that affect individual, group and organizational performance. This framework is used to explore the effects of workforce diversity in two cases and to provide answers to three central questions: how does diversity in uence the interactions in and the performance of diverse groups, and what is the relation between management diversity and other HRM policies in the two companies? The ndings indicate that an organization's strategy for managing diversity in uences both the process of meaning formation regarding diversity and the perception of performance effects. The availability of an organizational vocabulary and of instruments to interpret interactions in terms of diversity make a crucial difference. The stories and incidents from the two cases show how diversity affects both the daily interactions and the functioning of diverse groups.