Providence, Rhode Island
Feinstein Graduate School
A Paper on A Leadership Concept
A Research Project Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
Of the Requirements for the MBA Degree
MGMT 5800
Dr. Ron A. DiBattista
Wei Xing
June 23, 2013
Summary Today’s world is going to be more and more globalized. People from all around the world do business together. Under this situation, the concept ‘workforce diversity’ is becoming a hot topic. Diversity means the similarities and differences in age, gender, race, ethnicity, color, language, and physical abilities. In general, it refers to the differences between age, region, religion, disabilities, sexual orientation, education, and economic value. (Aslam, Ayub, & Razzaq, 2013) What’s more, Rob McInnes (2013) states the definition of workforce diversity as:
Generally speaking, the term workforce Diversity refers to policies and practices that seek to include people within a workforce who are considered to be, in some way, different from those in the prevailing constituency. The very famous example of workforce diversity in an organization is the NBA, which stands for National Basketball Association. In NBA, players are not only different from their color of skins, but also their nationality and culture background. There are a lot of great players from different countries. Such as, YaoMing(From China), Tony Parker (From France), Derk Noviski (From Germany), Manu Ginóbili (From Argentinia), and also Andrew Bogut (From Australia). Those international basketball players have changed people’s mind, not only American players, but players from other parts of the world can play well in basketball. With those players from all over the world, the NBA not only gains commercial benefits, but also increases competition between different teams. Customers can more likely watch more and more intensive competitions basketball games from NBA.
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What did those oversea players bring to the NBA? Commercial benefits from other countries? Expanded markets? That is just part of it. According to Richard (2000), the workforce diversity can add values to an organization’s competitive advantage. In NBA, the competitive advantage is the brand recognition, Team Logos, and also the portrait of their famous players. With the help of the international players, their brands, logos spread from Untied States to all around the world. For example, the famous Chinese basketball star, YaoMing, brought a golden opportunity to increase the brand awareness of NBA. After YaoMing’s first debuts in NBA, more and more people in China know what NBA is, what their logos are, and also the team ‘Houston Rockets’. The workforce diversity contributes not only to the whole league, but also leads to stronger performance to every NBA team. According to the research done by Armstrong, Flood,