Diversity Management: Breaking the Barriers to Achieve Industrial Sustainability in Nigerian Organizations

Abstract

In today’s global fast-rising business environment, dynamic organizations are embracing diversity to create inclusiveness in workplaces irrespective of sectors in nation’s economy. The achievement of inclusiveness within corporate culture holds the potential to ensure industrial sustainability and guarantee positive transformation of workforce behaviours as gain of diversity management in work organizations. In Nigeria however, institutional arrangements for effective management of diversity which should bring about inclusiveness is still somehow feeble. Discriminatory and exclusion practices continue to stifle sustainable performance and debase industrial sustainability objectives in Nigerian workplaces. The main thrust of this paper, therefore, is to put into perspective the inhibitory barriers to diversity management and proffer ways of mitigating these impediments to achieve sustainable performance in Nigerian organizations. These objectives were pursued through a review of literature. The paper contends that diversity management still has a low order maturity in most Nigerian organizations and needs to move beyond this encumbrance in order to engender opportunity for industrial sustainability objectives in corporate organizations. In conclusion, the paper calls for policy measures to reinforce the practice of diversity management as a critical success factor to minimize workforce inequality and maximise industrial sustainability priorities more effectively in the Nigerian work environment.