Diversity Maturity : How are managers in Sweden facing today’s diverse workforce?

Sammanfattning: Purpose The purpose with this research is to explore what management is doing in order to successfully manage the diversity needs in their workplace and to put up a conceptual model of the initiatives needed in order to reach a successful diversity strategy implementation. The questions are aimed at finding the barriers for managers to implement a successful diversity strategy. Our goal is to understand where the real practitioners of workplace diversity stand in the subject and which areas they wish could be taken a closer look by the researchers. We would also like to explore how mature the companies really are regarding the subject of diversity. Method The method for our thesis was to begin with an exploratory approach in order to gain a better knowledge of the subject and to learn where the literature stands today. To this we have added the collection of qualitative data through interviews made in eight different companies with a total of eleven managers in different levels of the organizations. Once all the data was collected and reviewed we ranked each manager and the company they work for to produce a picture of the diversity maturity present in these companies. Conclusions We have come to the following conclusions - Diversity is a strength and value for companies acting on a global market. - Diversity within a team make the team more productive, solutions are better since the input are from various angles. - To successfully maintain a diverse team puts more demands on the manager to realize that everyone is different and not to handle everyone the same. - There is a high level of maturity found in Swedish managers when it comes to diversity, but areas like training and recruitment policies need to be improved. - Swedish managers have a vast knowledge of what diversity means to their organizational process.