KWDI Korean Women’s Development Institute

Diversity management refers to the activities of planning and implementing the organizational system and practices in order to maximize the potential strength of diversity and minimize the weaknesses of diversity(Cox, 1993). This paper is designed to identify the as-is status of human resources (HR) diversity, and its management in Korean corporate contexts, and thereby provide the future directions.  In particular, considering that continuously lowering birth rates and accelerating population aging have raised the significance of women, diversity management schemes were studied for the development of women workforce.
We conducted an empirical study to investigate the diversity management and to analyze its relationships with firm performance, targeting about 300 Korean firms. The results of this study as follows; Firts, diversity management was classified into diversity-friendly HR management, family-friendly management, and diversity culture policies. Second, diversity-friendly HR management and family-friendly management were observed to have been effectively executed while diversity culture policies are shown to have fallen short of being satisfactory. Finally, diversity management was related with individual and firm performance.