Introduction
It is important to note that The Walt Disney Company is one of the largest media entertainment corporations in the world. The company primarily focuses on creating media products and streaming services but additionally operates and owns amusement parks worldwide. The Walt Disney Company utilizes the constructive conflict and controversy strategy to promote inclusion, equity, and diversity. It has already achieved a significant degree of diversity within its workforce, which is due to the fact that its multicultural audience demands such changes.
Company Information
The Walt Disney Company was founded by Walt and Roy Disney. The brothers established the company on October 16, 1923 (Disney, 2022). Currently, the Walt Disney Company is a giant multinational conglomerate with its headquarters in Burbank, California (Disney, 2022). The mission statement: “to entertain, inform and inspire people around the globe through the power of unparalleled storytelling, reflecting the iconic brands, creative minds and innovative technologies that make ours the world’s premier entertainment company” (The Walt Disney Company, 2022a, para. 1). The key products include amusements parks, web portals, video games, TV programs, music, films, and comic books. The core services are television, streaming, radio, publishing, licensing, and broadcasting (The Walt Disney Company, 2021a). It is reported that “the company employed approximately 190,000 people as of October 2, 2021. Our global workforce is comprised of approximately 80% full-time and 15%-part-time employees, with another 5% being seasonal employees” (The Walt Disney Company, 2021a, p. 1). The customers are both international and domestic, which includes a wide age demographic as well. However, the most interested and interconnected consumers are the younger generations globally.
All companies have operational segments that they perform more than capably. Disney’s strengths are the positive components of the corporation’s collective portfolio that have made the company better in one way or another. One of the core strengths of Disney Corporation is the vast and diverse scope of assets and businesses. The company owns major entertainment companies in the US and worldwide, including theme parks. Its intellectual property is used along with the subsidiary companies such as Marvel, which allows the integration of original characters into multifaceted realities of numerous heroes. In addition to Disney’s outstanding collection of fresh adaptations of ancient classics such as Robin Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Peter Pan, and Alice in Wonderland, the Company has developed a vast array of characters to appear in its feature films. The Walt Disney Company’s extensive product line is its greatest competitive advantage.
The company offers outstanding customer service to its clients. Employees at Disney are held to the highest standards of customer service. Their level of customer care requires customers to seek it out actively. Ex-Disney customer service specialists and instructors have authored successful books on the subject and their experiences with the “holy grail” of customer satisfaction. Disney is strict on maintaining pure, unstained, and ethically high moral values to keep up with the public image of the entertainment company that values every segment of its customers, especially children.
Status of Diversity within the Organization
Since the company employs and serves a highly diverse group of people, the Walt Disney Corporation takes the matter of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) especially seriously. It reports that “our (DE&I) objectives are to build teams that reflect the life experiences of our audiences while employing and supporting a diverse array of voices in our creative and production teams” (The Walt Disney Company, 2021a, p. 1). In other words, diversity is not a mere act of virtue signaling and affirmative action but rather a strategic necessity for the company’s performance. The Walt Disney Company has a highly diverse and multicultural audience for its media products and services. In order to properly cater to their needs and interests, the company actively employs a diverse group of workers who can relate to and understand these needs. Therefore, the concept of diversity plays a vital performance-improving and relevance-enhancing role in the organization.
Subsequently, the company actively promotes employees that are diverse. The Walt Disney Company states that “the more our consumers worldwide are reflected in our workforce, the better we’re able to serve them authentically” (The Walt Disney Company, 2022b, para. 3). In the company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) report of 2021, it states that its intention is “to progress towards a workforce reflective of the diverse audiences we serve” (The Walt Disney Company, 2021b, p. 16). The company promotes inclusivity and engagement from a diverse set of employees in order to promote them into leadership and management positions since their cultural insights are needed to create the most authentic products. The Walt Disney Company outsources its animation processes to Asian countries, such as Japan, South Korea, and India (Lee, 2019). This global value chain network enables a greater range of efficiency and high-value capture since quality animation is a challenging endeavor even with the existing technology (Yoon, 2017). Therefore, the company is dependent on the global supply chain system for the creation of its products and services.
Philosophy
The philosophy of diversity is directly reflected in the CSR report letter by the company’s CEO, Bob Chapek. He states that “we embrace a world of belonging through our continuing efforts to promote Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in our workforce and beyond” (The Walt Disney Company, 2021b, p. 4). In addition, he further claims that “we believe that greater representation and diversity of thought and experience make us a stronger, more capable, and creative company” (The Walt Disney Company, 2021b, p. 4). In other words, the leader’s philosophy is not only rooted in diversity being vitreous but necessary for the company’s success.
Strategies
The Walt Disney Company implements the constructive controversy strategy to manage diversity. Unlike concurrence seeking, the given strategy uses conflicts and controversies to derive new perspectives and insights from synthesizing and integrating them (Abramson & Moran, 2018). The outcome manifests in the “maximal participation of diverse viewpoints, higher solution creativity, stronger relationships” (Abramson & Moran, 2018, p. 246). There is substantive evidence supporting the fact that the constructive controversy strategy can be useful. A study found that “patterns of conflict had implications for effective conflict management and team efficacy for innovation” when constructive conflict and controversy are integrated into a team environment (O’Neill et al., 2017, p. 1). The same principle applies in regards to presenting products that might cause some form of conflict, which in turn, will facilitate diversity and inclusion among the consumers as well. The constructive conflict lies at the core of the diversity strategy utilized by The Walt Disney Company.
The sociocultural component of the corporate architecture focuses on societal trends that impact Disney’s distant or macro-environment via consumer and employee behavior. In the case of the company’s existing market, customer attitudes regarding items such as films, television shows, video games, and amusement parks must be examined. For instance, strategies must handle the habits and expectations of global corporate clients. The Walt Disney Company faces the following sociocultural external variables due to its status in numerous industry environments: positive sentiments regarding leisure, increasing internet use, and increasing multiculturalism.
Disney deliberately expands its foreign presence by capitalizing on positive leisure attitudes. The external sociocultural aspect improves customers’ possibility to purchase the company’s leisure and recreation items. In addition, one can identify the growing online activity as a potential growth opportunity for the Walt Disney Company. For instance, more online product accessibility can increase the company’s online transaction revenues. Increasing cultural variety, on the other side, challenges the appeal of Disney’s goods, such as movies and television programs. However, the external analysis views the same social external factor as a chance for the firm to develop its goods to represent the cultural variety of its target consumers. Globally, these social distant or macro-environmental elements can aid the company’s growth through strategic management that adapts the firm to customer behavior shifts.
Moreover, one of the key strategies utilized by Disney is diversity-driven differentiation. It is stated that product differentiation enables intensive growth for a large corporate enterprise, such as Disney (Williams, 2019). Evidence suggests that “consumers’ valuations are drawn from independent and general distributions. The unit cost of production is increasing and convex in qualities” (Barogozzi & Ma, 2018, p. 380). In other words, different products require a diverse set of distribution systems in order to preserve their unique elements, which was not fully practiced by Disney. According to Nakayama (2018), doing business on a global scale is altering the possible risks, introducing new possibilities, and posing a variety of business problems to adapt to the changing business environment. Enterprises must create long-term objectives to counteract environmental changes and devise flexible action plans to achieve organizational objectives (The Walt Disney Company, 2021). Strategy management tools and approaches aid organizational leadership in decision-making by examining the likelihood of adopting a strategic plan to fulfill competitive demands.
Goals
It should be noted that The Walt Disney Company can be considered one of the most diverse large enterprises in the world. The company’s core vision is called ‘A Reimagined Tomorrow,’ which consists of three diversity goals that are implemented by the company, and they still remain the corporation’s future objectives (The Walt Disney Company, 2021c). The first one is the conglomerate’s commitment to include being the key to market relevance (The Walt Disney Company, 2021c). In other words, The Walt Disney Company strives toward fostering a more inclusive environment, and significant progress has been made in this regard already. The second goal is to make The Walt Disney Company a better corporation by ensuring that both employees and managers are able to reflect the life experiences of the customers (The Walt Disney Company, 2021c). Thus, the company’s multicultural market necessitates having multicultural people within the structure of the conglomerate.
One of the key strengths of diversity is the fact that ideas become increasingly creative and diverse as well, but they need to be facilitated, encouraged, and captured through inclusivity. The third objective is to thrive through decisions and ideas that are valued within the inclusive environment (The Walt Disney Company, 2021c). Being a media and entertainment company, The Walt Disney Company needs to be creative and innovative to satisfy the need of its viewers. These strategic goals imply the use of effective solutions reflected in diversity and inclusion of all categories of ideas.
Current Status
When it comes to the current status of the organization, it can be considered an exemplary case of the successful integration of diversity and equity. For example, in the overall workforce comprised of 190000 people globally, 50% of the employees are women, and 46% are people of color (The Walt Disney Company, 2021d). On the executive level, 43% of top managers are female, whereas only 25% are persons of color (The Walt Disney Company, 2021d). Therefore, there is still room for improvement in diversity.
It is important to note that the multicultural workforce is diverse on its own as well. Currently, almost 30% of all workers are Hispanic, 8.6% are African American, and 7.4% are Asian, which already makes the organization among the most diverse in the US (The Walt Disney Company, 2021d). A similar level of inclusion and diversity can be observed with respect to the members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community. The company is listed as the best place to work for LGBTQIA2S+ individuals (The Walt Disney Company, 2021c). Since 2012, Disney has hired more than 10000 veterans, which further substantiates its inclusive and diverse workforce (The Walt Disney Company, 2021c). Therefore, despite the long journey ahead towards more inclusion and diversity, the company has already made significant progress in this regard.
The corporation is a major contributor to the cause of diversity, equity, and inclusion. It allocated and funded more than $150 million to specialized programs intended for underserved and underrepresented communities (The Walt Disney Company, 2021c). More than 29000 workers actively participate in “business employee resource groups” to facilitate even greater diversity, equity, and inclusion (The Walt Disney Company, 2021c, para. 10). Thus, there is a great sense of commitment toward diversity, which is realized through strategic means and objectives.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it should be noted that The Walt Disney Company is among one of the largest media entertainment conglomerates in the world. The corporate entity primarily focuses on creating streaming services and media products. In addition, Disney operates and owns amusement parks worldwide. The Walt Disney Company uses the constructive conflict and controversy strategy to promote inclusion, equity, and diversity. Due to the multicultural nature of its audience, it has already achieved a significant degree of diversity within its workforce. In a world as dynamic as modernity, strategic diversity management is essential for businesses seeking success. With globalization at an all-time high, strategic management is imperative among a company’s senior executives. Given that communication is the key to effective strategic management and empowering workers is a major advantage, it is advised that such managerial efforts are integrated throughout the organization.
References
Abramson, N. R., & Moran, R. T. (2018). Managing cultural differences (10th ed.). Routledge.
Disney. (2022). Disney history. Web.
The Walt Disney Company. (2021a). Fiscal year 2021 annual financial report [PDF document]. Web.
The Walt Disney Company. (2021b). 2021 corporate social responsibility report [PDF document]. Web.
The Walt Disney Company. (2021c). Belong: Our diversity & inclusion journey [PDF document]. Web.
The Walt Disney Company. (2021d). Workforce diversity dashboard [PDF document]. Web.
The Walt Disney Company. (2022a). The Walt Disney Company. Web.
The Walt Disney Company. (2022b). World of belonging. Web.
Williams, A. (2019). Disney’s generic competitive strategy & intensive growth strategies. Panmore Institute. Web.
References (Peer-Reviewed)
Barogozzi, F., & Ma, C. A. (2018). Product differentiation with multiple qualities. International Journal of Industrial Organization, 61, 380-412. Web.
Lee, J. (2019). Three worlds of global value chains: Multiple governance and upgrading paths in the Korean animation industry. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 25(6), 684-700. Web.
Nakayama, T. (2018). Empirical study on the application of strategic management tools and techniques in the Japanese companies. European Journal of Business and Management, 10(10), 134-143. Web.
O’Neill, T. A., Hoffart, G. C., McLarnon, M. M. J. W., Woodley, H. J., Eggermont, M., Rosehart, W., & Brennan, R. (2017). Constructive controversy and reflexivity training promotes effective conflict profiles and team functioning in student learning teams. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 16(2), 1-53. Web.
Yoon, H. (2017). Globalization of the animation industry: Multi-scalar linkages of six animation production centers. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 23(5), 634-651. Web.