Delivering effective diversity management through effective structures

The premise of this paper is that for effective diversity management, it is essential that an organization has in place factors that create effective structure, including workplace equality processes and programmes. In order to demonstrate this viewpoint, research was undertaken in a communications-intensive firm by means of the extensive examination of documents and corroborative interviews. The findings were obtained by means of Beer's Viable Systems Model (1985). The research assumption was shown to be the case—the major finding indicates that effective diversity management is dependent on appropriate structures and systems to support the communication and implementation of arrangements to create and sustain workplace equality. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.