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To overcome the shortcomings of diversity training programs, the purpose of this paper is to conceptualize an organizational diversity-learning framework, which features an organizational intervention for employees’ joint decision-making process with other employees from different statuses, functions, and identities. Borrowing key principles from the diversity learning (Rainey and Kolb, 1995); integration and learning perspective (Ely and Thomas, 2001; Thomas and Ely, 1996), and the key practices informed by deliberative democratic theories (Thompson, 2008), the authors develop a new organizational diversity learning framework for behavioral, attitudinal, and cognitive learning at workplaces. They conclude with directions for future research.

This paper first presents an overview of key shortcomings of diversity training programs in relation to their group composition, design, content and evaluation. Second, it borrows the key principles of diversity learning (Rainey and Kolb, 1995); integration and learning perspectives (Ely and Thomas, 2001; Thomas and Ely, 1996), and the key practices informed by deliberative democratic theories (Thompson, 2008) to delineate the organizational diversity learning framework. Third, it presents a table of the approach contrasted with the shortcomings of diversity training programs and discusses practical and theoretical contributions, along with directions for future research.

This paper conceptualizes an organizational diversity-learning framework, which features an organizational intervention for employees’ joint decision-making process with other employees from different statuses, functions, and identities.

The organizational diversity learning framework developed in this paper provides an inclusive diversity learning paradigm in which diversity learning rests in the experience of the learner. As stated by experiential learning theory, this framework encourages workers to heuristically learn about diverse perspectives in a psychologically safe environment, to reflect on different perspectives, and to create a new awareness about learning from others. As the participants learn to apply new repertoires for interacting with others in their daily work interactions (e.g. listening to different perspectives shared by unfamiliar social group members), it proposes that their behaviors may create a ripple effect, changing other colleagues’ attitudes, behaviors, and thinking patterns on working with diverse coworkers.

This paper provides detailed instructions for practitioners to facilitate diversity learning. It highlights a few key practical implications. First, the framework provides a method of organization-wide diversity learning through intersecting networks within the workplace, which is designed to reduce the elitist organizational decision making that mainly occurs at the upper echelon. Second, unlike other stand-alone diversity initiatives, the framework is embedded in the organizational decision-making process, which makes employees’ learning applicable to core organizational activities, contributing to both employees’ diversity learning and organizational growth. Third, the framework provides a preliminary model for transferring employees’ diversity learning in daily work operations, nurturing their behavioral learning to interact with different social groups more frequently at work and inclusive of their colleagues’ perspectives, feelings, and attitudes.

Workforces across nations are becoming increasingly diverse, and, simultaneously, the gap and tension between demographic representation in the upper and lower echelons is widening. By joining with other scholars who have advocated for the need to move beyond diversity training programs, the authors developed the organizational diversity learning framework for meaningful co-participation of employees with different statuses, functions, and identities. By inviting minority perspectives into the organizational decision-making process, top managers can explicitly send a message to minority groups that their perspectives matter and that their contributions are highly valued by the organization.

There has not been a conceptual paper that delineates the diversity inclusive decision-making process within a workplace. The authors established the organizational diversity learning framework based on the diversity learning, organizational diversity integration and learning perspectives, and deliberative democracy practices. The proposed framework guides organizations in structural interventions to educate employees on how to learn from multiple perspectives for better organizational decision making.

One of the urgent questions in the field of diversity is the knowledge about effective diversity practices. This paper aims to advance our knowledge on organizational change toward diversity by combining concepts from diversity studies and organizational learning.

By employing a social practice approach to organizational learning, the author will be able to go beyond individual learning experiences of diversity practices but see how members negotiate the diversity knowledge and how they integrate their new knowledge in their day-to-day organizational norms and practices. The analysis draws on data collected during a longitudinal case study in a financial service organization in the Netherlands.

This study showed how collective learning practices took place but were insufficiently anchored in a collective memory. Change agents have the task to build “new” memory on diversity policies and gender inequality as well as to use organizational memory to enable diversity policies and practices to be implemented. The inability to create a community of practice impeded the change agenda.

Future research could expand our knowledge on collective memory of knowledge on diversity further and focus on the way employees make use of this memory while doing diversity.

The current literature often tends to analyze the effectiveness of diversity practices as linear processes, which is insufficient to capture the complexity of a change process characterized with layers of negotiated and politicized forms of access to resources. The author would argue for more future work on nonlinear and process-based perspectives on organizational change.

The contribution is to the literature on diversity practices by showing how the lack of collective memory to “store” individual learning in the organization has proven to be a major problem in the management of diversity.

The purpose of this paper is to present knowledge as an important diversity dimension in globally operating companies and to illustrate how companies with corporate universities (CUs) proceed in order to achieve knowledge inclusion.

A model is developed regarding the management of knowledge diversity methodologically based on the grounded theory approach and examples in existing CUs are given.

Different diversity learning approaches in corporate university programmes are explained and integrated in a model. The paper recognises the need to more actively manage knowledge diversity in companies.

The paper gives advice to companies on how to better manage their diversity of knowledge and knowledge bearers for strategic learning purposes. The paper is a first step in the academic discussion of knowledge as a diversity dimension.

Knowledge is defined as a diversity dimension by scientists but has not been discussed in depth so far. The paper distinguishes between knowledge diversity and inclusion and shows in which way companies can proceed in order to profit from the diversity in learning environments.

In this chapter, the authors discuss the process of embedding experiential learning in a required ethics and diversity course (ED200). The course is a model of humanistic education in which students develop disciplinary-based methodological expertise while also drawing on cross-disciplinary, inclusive, problem-solving skills. The authors suggest that in a course that challenges students to think about their lives in community, engagement with that community plays a critical role in humanizing the learning experience. This pedagogical emphasis on experiential learning, instantiated as community engagement, unites the foci of ethics and diversity through students’ practical application of and reflection on their experiences to enhance ethical and cultural self-awareness. In the process, it also fosters a desire for participatory and justice-oriented citizenship (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). In what follows, the authors provide a history of the development of ED200. The authors then justify the inclusion of experiential learning in the course from theoretical and practical perspectives: Why is it valuable to include experiential learning in this course and how does it advance the goal of developing critically engaged citizens through improving ethical reasoning skills and actionable understanding of diversity? Last, the authors detail positive impacts and implementation challenges and indicate next steps for continued development.

Mezirow's theory of transformative learning aims to evoke change on a deeper level of learning. This qualitative study with 38 pre-service teachers enrolled in a Master's degree programme for teacher education in Austria used semi-structured interviews to explore how diversity skills can transform after diversity training applying Mezirow's theory of transformative learning. In these trainings, a disorienting dilemma was placed at the centre of the diversity training from which transformative learning took its start.

In an increasingly diversified school system, diversity skills have become a pedagogical necessity for teachers in their future workplace. However, many teachers state not feeling adequately prepared for diversity within higher education and their attitudes towards diversity oftentimes remain unchanged despite diversity training.

The findings were deduced from structured content analysis. They show that the diversity trainings led to new cultural frames of reference for the study participants on a cognitive and social level, but to a smaller extent on an emotional level.

The study follows a different approach than “typical” diversity trainings through Mezirow's theory on transformative learning contributing to making a real change to preparing students for their workplaces in diversified Austrian schools.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how diversity climate in service organizations influence employee learning behavior. Additionally, the study examined the mediating effects of psychological safety and communication satisfaction between diversity climate and learning behavior.

Data were collected from 128 hotel and lodging managers by administering survey questionnaires. The dual mediational model was tested using the mediation test suggested by Preacher and Hayes (2008).

Results indicated that when managers perceived a positive diversity climate they also reported high engagement in learning behavior. Additionally, the study found the mediating effects of psychological safety and communication satisfaction.

The importance of learning behavior has been noted by researchers and practitioners because of its influence on service performance. Learning behavior is especially important in complex, error prone, and fast changing businesses like the services industry. This research contributes to the existing body of research by examining the influence of diversity climate on learning behavior, which has not been investigated empirically in the literature. The current research not only makes a significant contribution to the learning and diversity literature, but also informs practitioners how learning behavior can be increased and how diversity climate can be created in within service organizations, in particularly hospitality.

College students who are interested in experiencing and learning about other cultures could be potential agents to ongoing social and policy initiatives in promoting societal changes. As universities intensify their efforts toward embracing cultural diversity, it is imperative to gauge how these diversity initiatives resonate with students' developmental stage and pursuits in diverse campus climates. However, what kinds of educational experiences/contexts students choose for enhancing cultural competence, and how seeking diversity experiences might benefit college students in emotional wellbeing and cognitive skills, are under-investigated.

This study explores the relationships among college students' diversity-seeking behaviors, cultural competence, perspective-taking, and flourishing. A total of 359 college students from a STEM-focused university participated in this study. Students were recruited from classes over four semesters, from 2021 to 2023.

Students exhibited moderate to high levels of interest in seeking diversity in their learning experiences. Results from the structural equation modeling showed that higher levels of diversity-seeking in learning were associated with higher levels of perceived cultural competence, as well as higher levels of perspective-taking and flourishing.

This research delves into experiential and extracurricular dimensions of learning diversity, bridging a significant gap in academic literature. This study also elucidates the links between aspects of diversity engagement, cultural competence, and positive outcomes for college students, which underscores the significance of diversity-focused educational opportunities in higher education. Such opportunities are instrumental in enhancing cultural proficiency and further implications on cognitive growth and emotional well-being.

The purpose of this paper is to advance knowledge of organizational change towards diversity by bringing together concepts from organizational learning and diversity studies.

This longitudinal study was conducted over two years. It involved interviews, observation of meetings and consultation of documentation and the analysis focused on organizational learning. The key research question was how do organizational members institutionalize their individual learning process to change in organizational cultures, routines and structures in a sustainable way?

The results showed that there had been learning at the individual level but this did not necessarily mean that participants had been able to transfer their learning into behaviour change.

The research suggested that training alone may not be sufficient to promote effective organizational change regarding diversity. Additional measures are likely to be required, for example, including diversity targets in performance management plans and reviews.

In order to achieve greater diversity, organizations are likely to need to use a number of methods to supplement initial training.

This research gives insight into how greater diversity may be achieved in organizations.

Previous literature understates the complexity of the change processes for enhanced diversity to be sustained in organizations. This study has originality in its focus on organizational learning.

This paper examines how groups respond to diversity. Specifically, a framework is developed that integrates prior research on diversity in groups within a learning perspective. The value of the framework is that it seeks to integrate various dimensions of group diversity with the intent of highlighting critical characteristics of groups that effectively manage diverse member contributions. Within this framework, the focus is on cognitive rather than demographic diversity and on how groups use diverse ideas and approaches to learn collectively. Based on this framework, it is suggested that groups manage cognitive diversity in three distinct ways, through accommodation, elaboration and transformation. These responses to diversity may represent different levels of group learning along a continuum ranging from routine, exploitative to non‐routine, exploratory learning. An exploratory study is presented in which this framework is used to understand how groups manage cognitive diversity. Preliminary study results suggest that most groups seem to respond to diversity by accommodating or elaborating while very few groups seem to engage in transformation. Specifically, few groups seem to invest the necessary resources to capitalize on diversity and create opportunities for non‐routine learning. Implications for practice and research are discussed.

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between teachers' perceptions on diversity perspectives in schools and their happiness at work (HAW) levels.

A correlational survey model was used in the study, and the stratified sample consisted of 768 teachers in public high schools in a province in the west of Turkey.

The result of hierarchical regression analysis showed that integration-and-learning, colour blindness and fairness diversity perspectives significantly predicted HAW. However, reinforcing homogeneity and access perspectives did not predict HAW. While positive affect, one of the dimensions of HAW, was predicted by integration-and-learning, colour blindness and fairness perspectives, negative affect was predicted by integration-and-learning and colour blindness perspectives. Moreover, fulfilment, the other dimension of HAW, was predicted by integration-and-learning and fairness perspectives.

School administrators can use the findings to increase teacher happiness at schools, developing proactive diversity management perspectives.