Exploration of the long-term antecedents of diversity training outcomes

Project scope: Discrimination on the basis of age, gender, ethnicity and other factors is still a major organisational issue. The challenge for organisations is to develop strategies that would enable organisations to address the changing employment relationships (Ehrke,Berthold and Steffens, 2014). Although diversity training is key method in addressing those challenges and developing individual skills (Pendry, Driscoll and Field, 2007), evidence suggests that current training activities fails to deliver change at organisational and individual level (Tomlinson and Schwabenland, 2010). However research on diversity training is disappointing, particularly around the long-term outcomes of diversity training at organisational level (Alhejji et al., 2016). It is upon this backdrop that the project aims to fulfil this knowledge gap by exploring the impacts of diversity training at organisational level. Of course organisation-level outcome is complex theoretically and methodologically because of the need to establish causality. Nevertheless, the project aims to address those challenges by exploring the outcome of diversity training at organisational level and how long the outcomes of diversity training will be evident or observable. It offers the opportunity to create critical framework by providing the ‘badly needed credibility and value of diversity training’ (Combs and Luthans, 2007:115) and provide a more rigorously explore diversity-training outcomes in a multiplicity of contexts, including different organisational types, sectors and categories of employees.

Methodology: A longitudinal survey is required to explore the effect of investment in diversity training and develop a robust framework on organisational outcomes. The measurement of diversity-training outcomes by simply asking participants does not capture the complex effects of diversity training at different levels within the organisation (Alhejji et al., 2016). Thus, the project aims to collect data from both participants and managers.