Chapter 7: Designing Culturally Appropriate Training and Development Programs: A Learning Styles Approach

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the design of culturally appropriate training and development (T&D) strategies for enhancing the performance of employees and organizations, using a learning style approach. We provide an example of African countries and use the results of a review of studies on African cultural values and management to discuss learning styles and T&D. The underlying premise is that T&D strategies are only effective when they are designed to fit with the cultural context. Based on Experiential Learning Theory (ELT, Kolb, 1984; 2014), the chapter reviews the Kolb (1984, 2014) learning model as a basis for designing T&D programs and applies this model using the African results. Given the limited number of studies on Kolb's learning styles cross-culturally, we suggest avenues for further research.