Cultural Diversity in the Workplace

Abstract

This article reports on a study of gender and race issues in the regional office of a federal agency. After setting their own research agenda of salient issues, employees completed a long, closed-ended questionnaire; a smaller sample also responded to ten open-ended questions. The results suggest that men, women, and people of color in the agency do not share a common culture of organizational life; instead, each group organizes its experience in the agency in different ways. The authors suggest that a theoretical perspective in which gender and race are viewed as cultures provides a useful framework for understanding cultural diversity in the workplace and a necessary starting point for managing a diverse workforce.