Globalization has been causing movement in the international labor markets for decades. It is more than just a question of a great many people claiming the world is their workplace. It’s not possible to have organizations without people, and without minimum efforts to manage them and to manage their differences. The realism of this assumption has led academics to develop wide debates concerning the ways of achieving competitiveness based on this human side of organizations. This discourse has been acknowledged by managers, as they are increasingly gaining awareness regarding the importance of people for organizations’ competitiveness. This is surely related to the fact that both academics and entrepreneurs have showed for quite some time that organizations need to have efficient procedures when dealing with their workers (Orlitzky, 2007). In order to get an understanding on the concept of cultural diversity, the researcher began with looking at the most common definitions in relation to the subject topic. In business terms, diversity can be defined as a set of differences of individual traits including socio demographic variables and professional variables, which can be found in an organization’s various levels (Cox, 1991; Thomas, 1991). Competitiveness on the other hand, is the ability of organizations, the economic branches and the state to operate, maintain, advance, and work according to the principles of efficiency and effectiveness to surpass the competition. Thus, competition is superiority over rivals and other competitors in the market. In view of the above, a way of promoting competitiveness is to look at the organizations’ resources and to manage them with a strategic sense. Despite the speed and the introduction of technological changes, globalization and the dynamics of business and internationalization of the market, learning and managing competitiveness is gaining importance. Workforce diversity has become an important issue in today’s organizations, as they are becoming increasingly diverse with respect to their workforce. Diversity exists in an organization when its members differ from one another along one or more important dimensions (Thomas and Ely, 2001). If everyone in the organization is exactly like everyone else, no diversity exists. But everyone is different along every imaginable dimension, total diversity exists. In reality, of course, these extremes are more hypothetical than real; most settings are characterized by levels of diversity somewhere between. Core (primary) dimensions of diversity include age, ethnicity and culture, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, and capabilities (Das and Wagar, 2007) while secondary dimensions include education, status, language, income levels and so on. Diverse workforce (diversity) refers to the co-existence of people from various socio-cultural backgrounds within the company. Diversity includes factors such as race, gender, age, colour, physical ability, ethnicity, etc. (Kundu and Turan, 1999). It has a fairly wide connotation and could include everything from age, culture, gender, race, religion and even thought. Typically, diversity refers to the demographic description of the people working for an organization and human resource policies to correct gender and other imbalances. From the foregoing background, the researchers deem it expedient to conduct this study to investigate the implications of cultural diversity for organizational competiveness.
