Abstract

Diversity in the workplace has been the trend in postmodern society and this trend is not about to change. In fact, the future of the workplace is diversity. However, the challenge is to reconstruct the workplace to make it demographically, culturally, socially, emotionally, politically, morally, spiritually, and structurally more inclusive and accommodating of difference. The strategies to achieve this equity in the diverse workplace have focused on diversity management, that is, the imposition of legal control and provision of human capital tools for managers to control diversity at the expense of developing diversity leadership with human factor competency (HFC). This paper claims that these managerial strategies may be necessary but insufficient ways to positively transform the workplace for the benefit of all. The reason being that outcome of the application of the managerial model to workplace diversity is similar to workplace diversity that occurs by default--employment of minorities and women mostly at the lower level, putting a few of them in powerful middle management positions and even fewer at the senior management level in response to equity legislation and the profit motive. Data from Canada’s 2006 Census of Population focusing on Aboriginal – non-Aboriginal participation in the labor force are used to illustrate this pattern. The failure of equity in the diverse workplace calls for alternative models. This paper proposes the HFC model of workplace diversity because of the model’s potential capability to unleash the power of diversity to create and reproduce equitable and sustainable workplace.