Why mandatory diversity training programs fail to promote workplace tolerance

Actions for Cultural Diversity Principles and Policies

From your understanding of the module materials and optional external literature concerning the importance of policy and guiding principles in cultural diversity, fully describe three significant principles, policies, and/or guidelines that you feel have been least effective in the educational setting, organizational setting, or society as a whole.

While the benefits of an effective diversity program are fairly clear, many programs fail to meet their objectives. For example, one review covering over thirty years of data from over eight hundred of the some of the larger U.S. workplaces found that the kind of standardized diversity training programs were actually counterproductive and these firms actually saw a significant decrease in the number of women in management (Vedantam, 2008). Although the counterproductive results are hard to explain, from my experience many of these programs seem like that they are superficial and administered without any sincere regard for outcomes.

If a program is administered for compliance or simply as a perceived requirement, then it is reasonable that most of these would be ineffective in actually promoting tolerance. Both the organization and the participants may feel that it is simply something to be gotten out of the way without any real substance or transformation involved. In fact, the research showed that mandatory programs are ineffective. According to Alexandra Kalev, who led the study, "When attendance is voluntary, diversity training is followed by an increase in managerial diversity (Vedantam, 2008)." This is problematic since most of the programs are created for mandatory compliance to federal rules. Therefore, many companies simply implement the cheapest programs and least time consuming programs available to meet the standards that are required and such policies are at least ineffective, possibly counterproductive to promoting tolerance and diversity. Furthermore, the fact that too much focus was placed on discrete legal requirements has been well understood for almost a decade (Richards, 2007).

2. Fully describe the principle, policy, and/or guideline concerning cultural diversity in the educational setting, organizational setting, or society as a whole that you feel has been most effective. Fully describe the educational practice most related to this effective principle, policy, and/or guideline. Incorporate related supporting source and/or author citations or references in your descriptions.

There are many policies that have been identified as being effective in diversity issues. One example that has been well researched and consistently identified as one of the critical success factors has been the support of top management in creating a culture of diversity (Rynes & Rosen, 2005). If the organizational cultural values cultural diversity, then the organizational will be natural predisposed to be more open. Furthermore, the culture is typically set by the top management and thus they have a significant role in promoting diversity acceptance.