Workplace Diversity in the Asia-Pacific Region: A Review of Literature and Directions for Future Research

Despite the increasing concern on workplace diversity, no research has been conducted to providing an objective visualization of the development of this fast-developing area and to complementing prior qualitative and meta-analytic reviews in the Asia-Pacific region. This research uses co-citation and co-occurrence analyses to trace how the landscape of diversity evolved from January 1993 to August 2021, using the scientific visualization tool CiteSpace. Based on a dataset of 636 diversity-related publications in the Asia-Pacific region collected from the Web of Science database, we conduct a bibliometric review to map the landscape, with the focus on identifying landmark researchers, articles, and journals, and the intellectual structure of, and changes in, diversity-related research themes. Further, a narrative review was adopted to summarize the frequently studied diversity themes, to capture the developing trends of diversity research, and to build an integrated model of workplace diversity in the Asia-Pacific context. Based on these findings, this review displays the evolution of diversity literature and uncovers future research directions to spur follow-up diversity studies.