Managing a specific Diversity: Indications from a Study on Organizations Employing Disabled Persons

An important role in current competition among enterprises is played by human resource management (Becker and Gerhart, 1996; Hiltrop, 1996): in some way, workers make difference and their care represents one of the most relevant dimensions in the construction of the competitive advantage. Already Barnard (1938) depicted organization as a cooperative system more effective than the single actor in achieving goals and underlined that the relationship between contributions and incentives has to be in balance according to the different needs, the different expectations and so on. So, a strategic task in organization is managing people. If we define HRM as the way an organization manages its staff and helps them to develop (Beer et alii, 1985), we easily understand that - if workforce becomes more and more a diverse labour force - the task becomes more challenging. Diversity Management is nowadays one of the most relevant challenges in HRM field: each organization has to identify its specific strategies and methods, on the one hand, to ensure that all employees (of different race, colour, economic status, sex, disability, etc.) have the opportunity to maximize their potentials and, on the other hand, to enhance workers’ self-development and to enlarge their contribution to the organizational goal (CIPD, 2005; European Commission, 2003). The topic is debated in academia, either from the theoretic point of view and from the research one (Cox and Blake, 1991; Ellis and Sonnenfeld, 1994; Barabino et alii, 2001; CIPD, 2006). Many of the studies argue that this practice is the only way for having a successful management about a moreover different workforce. Some critics point out that there is too little evidence about it from research. The research we present in this paper focused on one topic: it studies the practices of DM by Italian enterprises compelled by law to employ disabled persons. More specifically, if we consider that these organizations are compelled to employ disabled persons - but no obligations are expressed about the management of their diversity (both in terms of “whether” to manage and “how” to manage - and probably these aspects are impossible to be defined by law with a real and successful benefit) - the question we try to answer through the paper is whether DM can be considered the new perspective for HRM. In order to target this goal, the paper first identifies the scope of the DM, putting in evidence its evolution and its areas of interest, then it clarifies the important differences that can be observed about disability as regard the other fields of DM application. Afterwards, the research is described in order to put in evidence its principal results in terms of enterprise culture about diversity and of concrete operational procedures for the integration of disabled persons. Finally, on the basis of this empirical evidence, some conclusions are proposed in order to understand if DM can represent a concrete way to manage labour force (it’s the future for HRM) or if real practices are still far from an effective attention to specificities of each worker.