AUTHOR: Jakob Lauring, Jan Selmer; Aarhus University Denmark
COMMENT: This is a really interesting exploration and correlation of different dimensions of staff diversity and openness to diversity in 3 large Danish universities. The authors differentiate between surface level, demographic diversity (age, gender) and deep-level, international diversity (cultural and linguistic) and found these had different associations with attitudes and openness to value, visible, informational and linguistic diversity in the workplace. Demographic diversity had a negative association whereas international diversity was more positive. Almost 3/4 of the respondents were male.
ABSTRACT:
– Post‐secondary educational organizations are currently some of the most diverse settings to be found. However, few educational studies have dealt with staff diversity and hardly any has looked outside the USA. The purpose of this paper is to present a study of members of international university departments in Denmark. The authors set out to investigate the relationship between different types of staff diversity and openness to diversity in terms of linguistic, visible, value, and informational heterogeneity.
– This study uses responses from 489 staff members from diverse university departments to a self‐report electronic survey.
– It was found that diversity‐related internationalization (cultural and linguistic) was generally positively related to favorable diversity attitudes. Inherent demographic diversity (age and gender), on the other hand, was unrelated or negatively associated with positive diversity attitudes.