Critique 1

Article Reviewed:

“Workforce Diversity and Job Satisfaction of the Majority and the Minority:
Analyzing the Asymmetrical Effects of Relational Demography on Whites and
Racial/Ethnic Minorities”, written by Sungjoo Choi, Associate Professor,
Kyung Hee University Seoul, South Korea, published in Review of Public
Personnel Administration, January 2016.

The article, ““Workforce Diversity and Job Satisfaction of the Majority and
the Minority: Analyzing the Asymmetrical Effects of Relational Demography on
Whites and Racial/Ethnic Minorities”, by Sungjoo Choi, seeks to address how
racial mixture of the agency affects asymmetrically jobs satisfaction of
racial/ethnic minority and white employees. The research problem being addressed
is whether demographic composition of diversified workforce have a relationship
with job satisfaction of the employees in federal agencies and what are the
different influences that can affect their decisions.

It is clear from the abstract of the article that this is not a simple issue. In
fact the article fairly confusing for the first couple paragraphs. The author starts by
saying that structural relationships may affect work attitudes and behaviors of
people with them. Th author has given a multiple arguments to support her idea
through previous researches. However the evidences provided by the author to
define the variables like demographic structures, minority-majority settings and job
satisfaction through previous research could not establish the argument that mixed
structure of minority-majority of racial-ethnic workforce diversity have positive or
negative relationship with demographics of employees in an organization settings.
 To support this claim the author uses the example of viewing the previous
studies through a significant literature review, however, the research laps the
arguments established by the literature. To such a complicated issue the author
sums the research up well by saying that racial/ethnic minorities reported the
lowest job satisfaction in predominantly-white settings. In contrast, racial/ethnic
minorities reported to have the highest job satisfaction when they hold a majority
status in their agency (minority-majority settings).

This is good concept for how the problem of multiple level structures of
diversified workforce should be handled. However, there doesn’t appear to be any
concrete guidelines for carrying this out. In other words this sounds great on paper
but it doesn’t translate as easily to everyday life. There isn’t research in the
traditional sense for this article, but the author does include many examples of
work written by those who have written on this subject in the past.

Overall this article isn’t very straightforward in the beginning and it’s not
until the second page that you realize where the article is headed. In order to have
more people be engaged and read the whole article it needs a new, more concise
introduction. Once the reader gets to the really good examples that are relevant to
the everyday life of managing diversified workforce, a good portion of the article
has already past.

Overall it is a good, well-written article with an important message for

minority-majority settings of diversified workforce. The piece, when taken as a
whole, is relevant and very convincing in theory but starts slow and never lays out
a concrete way of approaching this complex problem.