Surmounting Resistance to Multicultural Training

Followership is valuable for personal and organizational success, whether success is measured by satisfaction with work, improved team relationships, obtaining promotions, or quality and quantity of work output. Furthermore, senior executives and coaches recognize it as a critical skill. Despite this, creating effective followership training in the classroom is challenging because of media messages that preference leadership, internal schemas held by students that ignore followership, and cultural biases against it. This article presents a memorable kinaesthetic, visual classroom activity that introduces followership in a theory-agnostic way. The exercise begins with students introducing each other as leaders or followers, and then debriefing that activity using the Describe, Analyze, and Evaluate methodology from multicultural training. Over a 10-year period, the exercise has successfully engaged undergraduate and graduate students, MBA candidates, and working professionals from frontline to senior management.

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Communication Theory and Training Approaches for Multiculturally Diverse Organizations: Have Academics and Practitioners Missed the Connection?

Public Personnel Management ◽

10.1177/009102600103000402 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 30 (4) ◽

pp. 445-455 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Marguerite Arai ◽

Maryanne Wanca-Thibault ◽

Pamela Shockley-Zalabak

Keyword(s):

Communication Theory ◽

Diversity Training ◽

Multicultural Training ◽

Theory And Practice ◽

Important Research ◽

Human Communication ◽

The Past ◽

The Common ◽

Multiculturally Diverse ◽

And Training

While a number of articles have looked at the importance of multicultural training in the workplace over the past 30 years, there is little concrete agreement that documents the common fundamental elements of a “successful” diversity initiative. A review of the training literature suggests the importance of human communication theory and practice without including important research, methodologies, and practice from the communication discipline. This article examines formal diversity approaches, provides examples from the literature of several successful diversity initiatives in larger organizations, identifies the limited use of communication-based approaches in diversity training, and discusses the importance of integrating communication theory and practice in future training efforts.

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Multicultural Communication Training for Law Enforcement Officers: A Case Study

Criminal Justice Policy Review ◽

10.1177/0887403400011003003 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 11 (3) ◽

pp. 234-253 ◽

Cited By ~ 15

Author(s):

Myrna M. Cornett-DeVito ◽

Edward L. McGlone

Keyword(s):

Law Enforcement ◽

Police Department ◽

Law Enforcement Officers ◽

Multicultural Training ◽

Communication Training ◽

Training Methods ◽

Training Outcomes ◽

Interactive Training ◽

Field Notes

This exploratory case study focused on multicultural communication training within the community policing context. Little research has addressed what constitutes effective content and delivery of multicultural training for law enforcement officers. Brislin and Yoshida's four-component multicultural plan was combined with limited law enforcement-related multicultural training literature to design a training program for a small city's police department. Two 4-hour training sessions were conducted by one of the investigators using a culture-general content approach and selected training methods to determine their usefulness for improving officers' multi-cultural competencies. The case included the training sessions together with pre-and posttraining activities over a period of approximately 3 months. Data were collected with selected test instruments and also from the field notes taken during the case activities. The results suggest that the culture-general model and interactive training methods and trainer qualifications may be key to yielding positive training outcomes.

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