Work Force Diversity : Diversity Makes Both Dollars and Sense : Market forces are likely to push firms to hire a wide range of employees to bring in the vigor they need to compete.

In “The Dirty Dozen,” Lee Marvin takes a motley bunch of criminals and turns them into a crack undercover team that accomplishes a mission everyone said was impossible. The characters--Hollywood’s version of diversity, circa 1967--include an Italian, a Latino, a Pole, a psychotic, a Native American, a really slow kid and Jim Brown, a black man no one will sit with at the movie’s beginning but who ends up being so critical to the mission’s success that his skin color is overlooked.

“A Few Good Men,” the 1990s version of this all-for-one, one-for-all teamwork, adds a woman--Demi Moore--to the mix. As a military investigator at a court-martial, Moore at first is ostracized--it’s her gender--but she later manages to win a spot on the team by proving she’s just as tough as the guys.

In other words, not much has changed.

Despite the considerable pressures, both legal and social, over the last 20 years, the golden standard of success in most American corporations remains the heterosexual white male in a charcoal-gray suit.

Women and minorities who don’t remake themselves in that image often find themselves permanent outsiders in the corporate club--their ideas dismissed, their contributions unrewarded. Their choice is simple: Conform or fail.

However painful this pressure is for individuals, it is far worse for American business. Changing domestic demographics and new global markets demand diverse language skills and workers who can function in different cultures. People with such attributes, though, often won’t take a job or stay with a company that hasn’t thoroughly rooted out racial, sexual and cultural barriers to advancement.

In other words, companies that stop short of a fully integrated work force--in fact and spirit--will be the big losers in the scramble for customers and talent.

As catalysts to change, today’s market forces are likely to prove more potent than the women’s movement, anti-discrimination laws or the Golden Rule.

“No company is going to do this because it is a nice thing to do,” says Andrea Cisco, a diversity consultant with Towers Perrin in New York. “They are only going to do it because it improves the bottom line and gives them a competitive advantage.”

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In other words, doing the right thing can be its own reward.

What does it take to land a deal in Asia? It usually takes an Asian, or someone steeped in the language and culture of the country in question. If it’s an ethnic clothing business owned by women in Albuquerque, you’d be foolish to send an entirely white-male consulting team. In Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, that might be appropriate.

Diversity, however, lies not only in the way a company’s representatives look to a client. It also involves their message and the sophistication of their ideas.

Building a work force that is diverse and skillful is a lengthy process. Experts say it takes at least 10 years for most companies, and failure can often be traced to quick-fix approaches that rely on quotas and window-dressing promotions.

“If you promote people of gender and color just to get them to a higher level, you pay the piper down the road,” said Dana Ellis, chairman of the Southern California diversity task force of the international accounting firm Arthur Andersen. “If they haven’t developed their business and technical skills sufficiently, they fail in a very public way that reflects badly on all of management.”

It is also a strategy that is blatantly transparent to other employees and often leads to low morale, costly turnover and warring interest groups.

Karen Stephenson, a professor of human resources at UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management, has seen her share of failed diversity efforts. In most cases, the companies went only as far as the Hollywood version. They ignored the potential of their atypical hires to invigorate the company with new ideas.

Stephenson cited one company in which every working group was at least half women, but the leader designated by top management was always a man. So, while women were represented in the company in large numbers, they had no real chance to grow into positions of greater responsibility.

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The pervasiveness of this problem is borne out statistically: Women and minorities make up 65% of the work force today, but they occupy only about 5% of the top jobs.

Another company Stevenson studied considered itself a model of diversity. It was “50% women, racially diverse and multiethnic,” she recalls, but there was little meaningful communication between members of different interest groups, even when they were supposed to be working on the same project. The company had done a good job at the hiring end, but it had put almost no effort into creating a framework to allow the employees to work as a team.

It’s a fact that people naturally gravitate toward others like themselves. When the work force was more homogeneous, social identification and teamwork on the job were almost synonymous. The person with whom you worked all day was very likely the person with whom you had a drink after hours or played golf on the weekend.

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That is not a given today. Besides race and gender differences, lifestyles vary greatly. Employees who have children may not have time to stop for a drink; weekend golf is not everyone’s idea of a good time.

Creating a corporate culture that fosters productive teamwork is the toughest part of the “diversity” job. It means getting past the smug comfort of quotas to recognize Jim Brown and Demi Moore as individuals. It means wanting them not just because they can conform superficially to a time-worn standard, but for their ideas, values and points of view. It means recognizing their contributions as essential to a creative workplace and a robust bottom line.