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Chapter 1 INSIGHT D I V E R S I T Y 1.6 Organizational Behavior and Management 27 UNION BANK OF CALIFORNIA’S APPROACH TO DIVERSITY Bank of California employees strive to provide great customer service to meet the needs of their diverse groups of customers. Customer loyalty follows as customers spread the good news about the bank to their friends and relatives. With assets of $33.9 billion on June 30, 2000, Union Bank of California, based in San Francisco, is the third largest commercial bank in California and among the 30 largest banks in the United States. 44 It has enjoyed huge success and growth throughout the last 10 years, in large part because of the way it has developed an approach to diversity that reflects the needs of its employees, customers, and its environment. Union Bank is based in one of the most diverse states in the nation, California, where half the population is Asian, Black, Hispanic, or gay. Recognizing this fact, the bank always had a policy of seeking to hire and recruit diverse employees. However, it was not until 1996 that the bank realized that it could use the diversity of its employees to create a competitive advantage. In 1996, George Ramirez, a vice president at Union Bank, suggested to the bank that it should create a marketing group to develop a plan to attract customers who were Hispanic like himself. So successful was this venture that a group of African American employees decided that they should create a marketing group to develop a marketing campaign to attract new African American customers. After they enjoyed considerable success in recruiting new customers, it was clear to Union Bank’s managers that they should use the diversity of the bank’s employees as a way of improving customer service so that, for example, when customers walk into a bank branch in a predominantly Latino neighborhood they will be greeted by a substantial number of Latino empolyees. 45 Similarly, marketing campaigns could be tailored to the needs of each different ethnic group. The bank, like many other organizations, also discovered that diversity can lead to competitive advantage because diverse employees approach the same issue (e.g., how to attract customers) with very different approaches and creating diverse teams of employees can help improve the quality of decision making inside the organization. Furthermore, the bank found that as its reputation as a good place for minorities to work increased, it began to attract highly skilled and motivated minority job candidates so that it helped itself. As its CEO Takahiro Moriguchi said in accepting a diversity award for the company, “By searching for talent from among the disabled, both genders, veterans, all ethnic groups and all nationalities, we gain access to a pool of ideas, energy, and creativity as wide and varied as the human race itself. I expect diversity will become even more important as the world gradually becomes a truly global marketplace.” 46 The bank also shows its approach to diversity in the way it grooms women and minority employees for promotion. More than four times as many women and minority employees for promotion. More than four times as many women and twice as many minorities are being targeted for promotion today than five years ago. 47 Will this approach to diversity hurt the pool of white employees? The answer is no because Union Bank expects its approach to diversity to result in so much growth and expansion that many new jobs will be created and in the end everyone will benefit. ■
28 Chapter 1 Organizational Behavior and Management Two other significant performance issues confront organizations with a diverse workforce. First, research has found that many supervisors do not know how to manage diverse work groups and find it difficult to lead diverse groups of employees. Second, supervisors are often uncertain about how to handle the challenge of communicating with employees whose cultural backgrounds result in assumptions, values, and even language skills that differ from the supervisors’. 48 Various racial or ethnic groups may respond differently to the demands of their job responsibilities or to the approaches that leaders use to manage relationships in work groups. Age and gender differences can also cause problems for managers, such as when younger employees find themselves in a position of authority over older and perhaps more experienced employees. Similarly, some men find it difficult to report to or be evaluated by women. The mixing of generations, such as the baby-boom (1946–1964) and the baby-bust generations (1965–1976), can also cause problems (as we discuss in Chapter 4). If diversity produces conflict and distrust among organizational members, individual, group, and organizational performance suffers and organizations must take active steps to solve diversity-related problems. 49 For example, if the skills and talents of women and minorities are not being fully utilized because older white males cannot (or refuse to) recognize them, an organization will suffer a significant loss of potential productivity. To reduce such losses, many organizations have instituted cultural diversity programs to improve personal and group relationships, to promote cultural sensitivity and acceptance of differences between people, and to promote skills for working in multicultural environments. 50 Flexibility Challenge A third diversity challenge is to be sensitive to the needs of different kinds of employees and to try to develop flexible employment approaches that increase employee well-being. Examples of some of these approaches include the following: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ New benefits packages customized to the needs of different groups of workers, such as single workers with no children and families, homosexuals in long-term committed relationships, and workers caring for aged parents Flexible employment conditions (such as flextime) that give workers input into the length and scheduling of their workweek Arrangements that allow for job sharing so that two or more employees can share the same job (e.g., to take care of children or aged parents) Designing jobs and the buildings that house organizations to be sensitive to the special needs of handicapped workers (and customers) Creating management programs designed to provide constructive feedback to employees about their personal styles of dealing with minority employees Establishing mentoring relationships to support minority employees Establishing informal networks among minority employees to provide social support The Xerox Corporation, for example, has undertaken major initiatives to increase diversity by increasing the proportion of women and minorities it recruits and promotes. Xerox has also established a sophisticated support network for minor-
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