The influence of diversity complexity and emotional intelligence on the attitude towards diversity in organisations

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The plethora of differences that characterise the South Africa population has becomea definite concern for organisational management and is of significant importance tothe industrial world itself. The need to critically assess people's perception andattitude towards diversity within the organisation, and ultimately serving to informmanagement seeking to build an ethically diverse, healthy and productive workforce,served as a prime motivation for this study. The objective was to demonstrate thathumans are complex beings and that attempts to minimise the complexity by simplycontaining that complexity within the bounds of a unidimensional solution areguaranteed to fail. It is for this reason that diversity management within anorganisation requires the need to manage an infinite and changing variety of socialvariables which to varying degrees, impacts on social interaction and people's attitudetowards diversity.Having completed a literature study concerning the possible antecedents of attitudetowards diversity, and taking into account various suggested future directions fordiversity research, it was decided that the present study would focus on three specificvariables: attitude towards diversity, emotional intelligence and diversity complexity.The primary goal was to design and conduct a scientific investigation into therelationships between the latent variables; in hope of ultimately informingmanagement seeking to build an ethically diverse, healthy and productive workforcewho value the individuality of others. Available literature was studied in order tounderstand and comprehend whether any relationships could be theoretically drawnbetween the constructs. Several hypotheses were proposed and a conceptual model,explaining the relationships between these constructs, was developed. Thereafter, boththe postulated relationships and the conceptual model were empirically tested usingvarious statistical methods.Existing measuring instruments were utilised in this study, and included the CulturalDiversity Belief Scale (Rentsch, Turban, Hissong, Jenkins & Marrs, 1995), the GenosEmotional Intelligence Inventory (Palmer, Stough & Gignac, 2008), and the Reaction-To-Diversity-Inventory (De Meuse & Hostager, 2001). The sample consisted of 237 selected individuals from various South African organisations. The content andstructure of the constructs that were measured by the instruments were investigated bymeans of confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses. The results indicated that inall cases, the refined measurement models achieved good fit. Subsequently, StructuralEquation Modeling (SEM) was used to determine the extent to which the conceptualmodel fitted the data obtained from the sample and to test the relationships betweenthe constructs when taking the complete conceptual model into account. Overall, itwas found that good model fit was indicated for the structural model. Regressionanalyses also found some support for the stated hypotheses. Eight of the ten statedhypotheses in this study were corroborated.Although several significant links were established between the latent variables, anotable unique result of this research presented itself in the significant positiverelationships uncovered between the exogenous latent variable, emotionalintelligence, and the endogenous latent variables of valuing individual differences andpositive perceptual depth. These significant positive relationships provide empiricalevidence of the significant relationships between emotions, attitudes and perceptions.Moreover, the analysis of the modification indices for the structural model, suggestedthat the addition of one path to the existing structural model would probably improvethe fit of the model. Recommendations are made in terms of possible avenues forfuture research.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University