Research Article
Case Study on LOTTE Female-friendly Initiatives in the Lens of Ely & Thomas Diversity Process
1 Dongguk University, 2 Lotte Human Resources Development Institute
Published: January 2018 · Vol. 22, No. 2 · pp. 53-70
DOI: https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.17287/kbr.2018.22.2.53
Full Text
Abstract
The chairman of Lotte, Shin Dong-Bin, has been leading pro-diversity initiatives since 2016, such as a ‘Diversity Charter,’ two years of mandatory maternity leave, and at least one month of mandatory paternity leave. In 2015, the company began to deliberately change its gender composition, requiring that more than 40 percent of new employees must be women, in order to become Korea’s most female-friendly company. This research has studied Lotte’s pro-diversity initiatives through the lens of Ely’s & Thomas’ diversity process. The first step for Lotte was to eliminate possible discrimination by revealing its Diversity Charter and adopting a blind hiring process, Spec-tackle. As a second step, Lotte became the first company to adopt the aforementioned maternity and paternity policies and increased the ratio of female to male managers by 8 times over the last 5 years. The third step was to set up a diversity task force team to engage more employees in diversity activities in order to become a learning organization. The case attempts to interest more Korean organizations in diversity issues by investigating diversity initiatives at a Korean company and their effectiveness based on internal research.
