STUDENTS’ UNDERSTANDING OF WORKPLACE DIVERSITY: THE CASE OF REPUBLIC OF NORTH MACEDONIA

Abstract

The importance of the research on workplace diversity has significantly increased in the past few decades. Namely, as a result of the increased possibilities for working from distance and the changes in the regulations that protect the rights of the individuals and groups with different background and physical and psychological characteristics, the workplace diversity and inclusion issues become a prominent research topic in the human resource management and management literature. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate students’ understanding of diversity in our country, on a sample of students from the Faculty of Economics – Skopje. The need for conducting such a study in our country emanated from the fact that we live in a society where diversity issues are perceived and acknowledged. For investigating students’ understanding of diversity, we used two instruments (Reaction-to-Diversity Inventory and Workplace Diversity Survey) developed by De Meuse and Hostager (2001). The first one was used for investigating students understanding of the term workplace diversity and the second one for researching the determinants of the students’ understanding of diversity. The questionnaire was distributed electronically among students from the Faculty of Economics – Skopje, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. The analysis of the responses on Reaction-to-Diversity Inventory has shown that most of the students relate diversity with the term unity (47), which refers to the organizational outcomes as one of the dimensions of diversity. Besides referring to the organizational outcomes, it is important to note that unity is a term that has positive connotation. The results from the multiple regression analysis on the sample of 184 respondents, indicate that besides teachers’/professors’ engagement in educating on diversity and students’ gender, students’ academic success should be considered as a predictor of their understanding of diversity (although the statistical association of students’ grade and their understanding of diversity is statistically weaker and negative).