Diversity Education Corporate

Diversity Education The American workplace has become increasingly diverse, a reflection of the American urban environment. Diversity training serves a few different purposes in organizations. The first is that it promotes an atmosphere of tolerance in the company, but many scholars have also made a business case for diversity.

Some earlier writings on the subject outlined that diversity training helps to resolve internal conflict, improve communication flows within the company, align the company better with its market, and can also help improve organizational creativity by introducing new ideas to organizations (Cox & Blake, 1991). Later writers noted that the effects of diversity were complex, something that should be reflected in the way that the organization trains for diversity (Milliken & Martins, 1996).

As awareness of diversity grows, and the case for diversity training increases, it is evident that more companies are including a diversity component in their training programs. Initially, diversity training was oriented towards compliance issues, following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but by the 1990s the tone of diversity training shifted. The focus at that point was on improving working relationships, and by the 2000s the focus for diversity training had shifted again, this time towards leveraging diversity for competitive advantage (Anand & Winters, 2008).

There is a certain case to be made for diversity training. As the workplace becomes increasingly diverse, it is necessary to ensure that the transition to diversity is smooth. Yes, there are compliance issues at work, and this is something that the company must be aware of. But the change in how organizational diversity is viewed and trained reflects the belief today that diversity can be a powerful source of advantage.

The current economic environment is so globalized that no company is without workers, suppliers, customers or competitors from other cultures, and therefore it is necessary to provide some education as to how this can be utilized for advantage. This is not to say that there are no ethical issues with regards to diversity training. One point of opposition to diversity training has arisen, not so much with the idea in general, but in the way that diversity is taught.

In many spheres, diversity training has a tendency to focus on the idea that all are equal, and indeed more or less the same. This view, possibly rooted in Eurocentric guilt for past oppressions, ends up whitewashing people, when the reality is that people from different cultures can be very different from each other. This has led to criticism of one of the underlying assumptions around which much diversity training is built. It points to a different form, a new evolution, of diversity training, in which organizations accept differences.

Being culture blind is not the same thing as embracing diversity (Todd, 2014). Fortunately, when organizations seek to leverage diversity, they are taking this view more frequently, reflecting that the situation on the ground is increasingly being reflected in corporate diversity training. This debate introduces competing ethical perspectives on diversity training. Ethical relativism holds that one aspect of diversity is that ethics are different, and these should be understood and accepted (Swoyer, 2003). Thus, we should take the time to understand and respect the differences of different cultures.

A reduced view of ethical relativism is more along the lines of viewing everybody as equal to the point where all are expected to follow the same standards. Companies train for both. In many cases, companies train for corporate culture, as use this as a baseline. All employees, regardless of background, must at a minimum conform to the corporate culture.

Diversity training has, in this context, has the valuable role in accepting that a common culture can exist within the framework of a diverse population -- organizational values are not necessarily threatened by, say, someone needing to take a few minutes to pray. Personally, I feel that a balance needs to be struck with respect to diversity training. In a diverse society, it is perfectly reasonable to train for acceptance of differences, insomuch as those differences do not adversely affect the organization.

But companies are within their rights to superimpose a corporate culture on top of their diverse workforces, in order to ensure that there is a common cultural ground between sometimes disparate grounds of people. The current evolution of diversity training shows that organizations are still working on finding the optimal balance in their training programs. Scholarship of the issue itself is evolving to tackle the different moral and ethical questions that arise from it. Ultimately, though, we might be coming to a point where diversity training has outlived its usefulness.

When the idea first evolved, and when it gained steam in the 1990s, the idea of diversity in the workforce was still a novelty in most places. But today, in a world.