Title:
THEORY OF OPTIMUM WORKFORCE DIVERSITY

Authors:
Dr. Doris Gitonga,(PhD), Dr Mary Kamara (Ph.D and Professor George Orwa, (Ph.D), Kenya

Abstract:
The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between various workforce diversity elements namely; age, gender, work experience, and culture among employees and the performance of organizations with specific reference to telecommunication firms in Kenya. It further sought to determine as to whether employee engagement moderates the relationship between workforce diversity and organizational performance. Continuous attention to the issues of workforce diversity is important because it can be a major source of conflict leading to poor employee relations and low employee engagement. Workforce diversity issues may also adversely affect an organization’s public reputation, competitiveness and can significantly threaten the bottom line. However, there is a level of diversity that would be counterproductive to an organization. Too low levels of diversity (extreme homogeneity) in terms of age, gender, work experience and cultural diversity would lead to few innovations, limited knowledge transfer and monotony of ideas while too high levels (extreme heterogeneity) of the same aspects of diversity may not be desirable as well as it would lead to team conflict, delayed decisions, resistance to change, and disengagement. The theory of optimum diversity suggests that organizations should endeavor to identify, maintain and work within an optimum level of diversity. The study used descriptive research design with application of quantitative research techniques. The target population for the study was managerial staff in all mobile telephone and internet service providers in the telecommunication industry in Kenya. Secondary and primary data is collected and analyzed from 14 telecommunications firms for a period of five years (2010-2014). A sample of two hundred and seventy (270) managers, from the telecommunication firms were used as respondents to a structured questionnaire for the purpose of collection and analysis of both secondary and primary data with respect to age, gender, work experience and culture of employees as well as on organizational performance. Blau’s index (measure of heterogeneity) was used to operationalize the four aspects of workforce diversity. Financial measures of performance and in particular growth in sales was used to measure firm performance due to its popularity as a measure of performance among the targeted firms. Various statistical techniques including both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to find out the level and direction of correlations between variables. These techniques included but not limited to descriptive analysis, correlation analysis, analysis of variance, simple & multiple regression analysis. The correlation coefficients (r)for all the variables were positive, statistically significant (p<.05). Age diversity and work experience diversity had the highest correlation at .767, followed by age diversity and gender diversity at .734 and finally the lowest correlation was between gender diversity and cultural diversity at 0.543....