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Introduction
The rapidly increasing diversity in the US workforce has prompted a need for public and private sector organizations to acknowledge diversity management in their human resource management practices (Pitts, 2009; Choi and Rainey, 2010). Pitts (2009) reasons that the task of formulating sound diversity management practices, however, can be difficult particularly for public organizations because of their traditionally homogeneous profile of potential employees, which makes it harder for them to adapt to a new and changing environment. Considering that successful diversity management has been related to increased job satisfaction and a higher sense of well-being among employees (Mor Barak and Levin, 2002), as well as career advancement and decrease in turnover (Mor Barak and Cherin, 1998) for public organizations struggling to retain high-quality employees due to dissatisfaction with promotion opportunities (Lewis, 1991) and lack of access to the tools they need and rewards they deserve (Light, 2008), managing diversity has become the most salient issue in human resources management.
Diversity management, defined as a "voluntary organizational program designed to create greater inclusion of all individuals into informal social networks and formal company programs" by Gilbert et al. (1999, p. 61), has received recognition from both researchers and practitioners as a new human resource management strategy to cope with the increasing diversity of the US workforce (Ivancevich and Gilbert, 2000). However, very little empirical research has been conducted on the relationship between diversity management and work group performance, with a few exceptions (e.g. Pitts, 2009; Choi and Rainey, 2010). More importantly, despite its popularity as a human resource strategy, its proposed outcomes were often met with conflicting results (Andrews et al. , 2005; Pitts, 2005; Pitts and Jarry, 2005; Choi and Rainey, 2010). We argue that some of the mixed findings are in part due to a lack of robust measures for conceptualizing and operationalizing the diversity management construct. For example, our review of the literature indicates that previous empirical studies do not distinguish between the effects of organization-wide diversity policies and the effects of leadership behaviors that play a strategic role in cultivating an inclusive organizational culture (e.g. Choi and Rainey, 2010; Choi, 2008; Pitts, 2009). Given that diversity management is a managerially initiated strategy in which leaders find themselves in charge of...