The changing demographics of Australian society and its workforce have propelled Australian Public Service (APS) organizations to proactively engage in diversity management (DM). Despite this growing imperative for DM in the APS, there has been little inquiry into the effectiveness of such programs. The aim was to investigate how an APS agency was transforming its commitment to DM into action. The findings revealed that a significant gap exists between the rhetoric of what the DM policy seeks to achieve and the reality experienced by employees in the areas of targeted recruitment, employee retention, and employee development. The practical implications of findings for wider stakeholders responsible for designing and implementing DM are discussed and limitations are noted together with recommendations for future research.

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The purpose of the study was to explore the relationship between individual factors (gender, language background (LB), nationality, English language proficiency (ELP), diverse group work experience (DGWE)) and cognitive processes (bias, stereotyping, anxiety & apprehension) and investigate the nature of any emerging differences, using the sample of 837 undergraduate students. Owing to the irregular distributions of the criterion variables we combined the sensitivity and versatility of parametric tests (t-tests, ANOVA) with the robustness of the equivalent non-parametric tests (Kruskall Wallis, Mann-Whitney). Strong conclusions were drawn where both groups of tests proved significant at the .01 level. The results revealed LB, nationality, ELP, and DGWE have a statistically significant impact on bias. LB, nationality, ELP and DGWE also appear to have an impact on stereotyping while anxiety & apprehension appear to be influenced by gender, LB, nationality, ELP and DGWE. The precise differences and implications for academics and researchers are discussed.

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