Workplace Diversity and Employee Performance: An Empirical Analysis of Nigeria’s Banking Sector

Abstract

The rapid growth in the Banking industry has posed several challenges such as workplace diversity which is a natural phenomenon that has both negative and positive impacts on employee performance depending on how well it is managed. Studies have shown its management or mismanagement can affect the overall performance of the commercial banks in financial service sector. It is in this context and against this backdrop that this study explores the impact of Workplace Diversity proxied by Age diversity, Gender diversity, Ethnic Diversity, Income diversity, Education Diversity and Belief diversity on the dependent variable, employee performance proxied by the employee effectiveness. The study adopted a survey research design. While the study population consisted of all twenty-two Commercial Banks in Nigeria. A sample size of three hundred (300) respondents was selected. The internet mail survey had a 90% response rate. Data collection was by use of questionnaire through internet MS survey link. Analysis was by use of descriptive and inferential statistics in SPSS version 25.0. The Regression analysis coefficient indicated the strength and direction of relationship between each independent variables and the dependent variable and tested at 5% significance level. The study therefore concludes that workplace diversity variables like Gender diversity, Income diversity, Ethnic Diversity and Belief diversity have significant impact on the employee effectiveness thus their respective performance. However, Age and Educational diversity is found to be having no significant effect on performance of employees in the organization. The study was concluded with few recommendations and limitations. The study recommended that in order to leverage on the existing and observed diversity impact on employee effectiveness, the organizations need to begin to get conscious of why it is needful that they deal with demographic characteristics to gain a competitive advantage over competitors and stay competitive and make certain that great effort is taken to ensure that workers are properly informed of the present or existing initiatives and programmes of diversity and ensure to educate or train existing and newly employed employees on issues of diversity and its importance.