Abstract
Diversity management (DM), inclusive leadership, and workforce diversity are well-established management practices in today’s corporate world. They are part of a trend that addresses the management of traditional workforce ‘differences’ in terms of, for example, gender, ethnicity, race, and national culture. With the emergence of this trend, the term global diversity management has been adopted to describe the efforts, in particular by multinational organizations, to manage workforce differences. Global diversity management thus builds on a combination of DM and cross-cultural management (CCM), which are both multi-faceted fields inspired by various research traditions. CCM and DM are thus often, in practice, considered together when adopting strategies to manage employees’ differences. Doing so assumes that both fields are compatible. This chapter aims to problematize the existing conflation of CCM and DM studies under the label of, for example, global diversity management, in order to develop conditions under which dialogue and synergies between the two can be extended. Outlining how the fields differ, we identify the opportunities created at their intersection. This chapter first briefly presents the existing framework of global diversity management, which sits at the intersection of CCM and DM. Then, we outline a case to illustrate the tensions and contradictions emerging at this intersection. We explain these tensions by adopting a meta-theoretical level of analysis and showing that there are four major research traditions (using Burrell and Morgan’s 1979 paradigmatic grid) represented in both CCM and DM.