Diversity Management in the Modern Organization: New Frontiers for Business Organisation and Human Resources Management

In recent decades, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been the protagonists of a profound change in the competitive scenario due to the presence of a diverse workforce composition. The entrepreneur is aware that human resource diversity is a fast-growing phenomenon and central to the development and competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises considering three phenomena combined in a systemic way: the presence of a diverse workforce, people needs, and the increased need for organizations to support complex systems of ad personam integration. This path of cultural growth within our organizations has run into the COVID 19 health emergency, which has led to a reshuffling and scaling back of the projects and progress hitherto made and achieved. The paper seeks to map the underwriting of the diversity management model promoted by the European Commission during a period of severe economic and social hardship due to the Pandemic to answer the following research question: Does the underwriting of these documents really represent an opportunity for "Unity in Diversity" for Europe? The paper will focus on Italy and then later replicate the analysis in the other signatory countries in order to make a comparison.