Impact of Workforce Diversity on Employee Job Performance: Evidence from a Leading Apparel Company in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Diversity of the workforce can be seen as an important strategic tool that adds value to an organization rather than creating competition. The main objective of the current research study was to find the impact of workforce diversity on the employee performance of production-level employees working in an apparel company of Sri Lanka. There are many diversity dimensions that can positively or negatively affect the performance of employees. But the present research has included the most critical set of dimensions among other dimensions such as diversity in age, ethnicity, gender, and educational background towards the employees, which were independent variables, and employee performance in an organization which was a dependent variable. This study was carried out as a cross- sectional field study among a sample of 152 production level employees in a selected apparel company in Sri Lanka. The simple random sampling technique was used to select the sample, and primary data were collected using a standard questionnaire. Moreover, Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyze descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, regression, and correlation analysis. Accordingly, it was found that, there is a significant impact of workforce diversity on employee performance of production-level employees in the selected apparel company of Sri Lanka. Further, the study results showed that age diversity, ethnic diversity, gender diversity, and educational background diversity have a positive impact on employee performance. Moreover, these findings are expected to be very important theoretically and practically for the relevant parties in the apparel industry.