Incident: The Cultural Diversity Training Program

Cultural diversity is people of varying origins and ways of life living or working alongside in a specific area or organization. Cultural diversity is important to all organizations for many reasons. By having a strong, diverse workforce, barriers to productivity and innovation can be broken. A cultural diverse workforce can let everyone enjoy the opportunity of being a part of creating business value. Also, cultural diversity is important, because it can manage relationships so there is better satisfaction between employees which helps create better business. However, the diversity training that Donna Malone and her colleagues participated in was far from creating any value.

The university could have had more two-way communication with the speakers and also let the audience participate in some mock cases. The speakers at the university were merely giving informative speeches and time did not allow for any interaction between them and their audience. Exercises and cases could have taught them the kind of impact that negative workplace diversity like discrimination, stereotyping and sexual harassment can cause. The university could have also showed the appropriate policies and procedures to have in place to combat the differences in cultural background and experience. The university concentrated mostly on “changing workforce demographics and the failure of the university to be more open, accommodative, and responsive to minority students, employees, or potential employees” (Nkomo 32). There are many issues that the university could have covered like age, gender, sexual harassment, religion, disability and others to make the five white attendees less intimidated at the seminar.

The training program could have opened the concept of these other diversity issues to make their training program more effective and less hostile for the small number of white people in the audience. This would apply to any small group of people in an audience. The university should not be trying to single out any group to make them feel less welcome and inferior. Pendry states that it is important to have exercises that do not humiliate or upset participants, but is effective in teaching them what’s right and wrong in certain diversity situations. The university should have created an atmosphere so that no one attending the seminar was humiliated or upset.

Since the Office of Diversity Initiatives would continue to plan and implement diversity training, they should improve their seminar to be a more open discussion. There should be more communication between members of the audience and more communication from the speakers instead of a boring, informative speech where questions were discouraged. Also, make sure it is fun and encouraging for every nationality and gender involved. There should not be any guilt-inducing to other people, and more working together with other culturally diverse people to promote that differences are positive and can stimulate creativity.

Reference

Pendry, L.F., Driscoll, D.M. & Field, S.C.T. (2007), Diversity training: Putting theory into practice, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 80 (1), pp 27-50Nkomo, Fottler, McAfee. Human Resource Management Applications: Cases, Exercises, Incidents, and Skill Builders. 6th ed. Mason, OH: Thomson South-Western, 2008.