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"Without the support of whites, organizations and educational settings will fail in their attempts to navigate and manage the complexities of diverse work forces and constituencies," said Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, an associate professor of management and organizations at Michigan's Ross School of Business. "In the face of the dramatic projected growth in demographic diversity, such failure could have severe economic, social and political consequences. "Our research reveals that this resistance can have little to do with prejudice. Instead, it can stem from a basic human need to belong."

The researchers found that fulfillment of a diversity of needs, as defined by Maslow, do appear to be universal and important to individual happiness. But the order in which "higher" and "lower" needs are met has little bearing on how much they contribute to life satisfaction and enjoyment, Diener said. They also found that the fulfillment of more basic needs - for money, food or shelter, for example - was more closely linked to a positive life evaluation, the way an individual ranked his or her life on a scale from worst to best. The satisfaction of higher needs - for social support, respect, autonomy or mastery - was "more strongly related to enjoying life - having more positive feelings and less negative feelings," Diener said. An important finding, Diener said, is that the research indicated that people have higher life evaluations when others in society also have their needs fulfilled.