Chapter 6: An Organizational Justice Analysis of Diversity Training

Diversity training in the United States has been seen as everything from a critical strategic business advantage to a source of discrimination lawsuits. In an attempt to understand such varied reactions to diversity training programs, we examine diversity training from an organizational justice perspective. Organizational justice principles of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice are extended to general training programs as a possible framework for understanding reactions to training. We then examine the administration and delivery of diversity training from the perspective of these justice principles. Research propositions and recommended training practices are provided. The final section of this chapter considers individual differences in reactions to diversity training based on beliefs in multiculturalism. We hypothesize how different multicultural beliefs (radical structuralists vs. functionalists) influence preferences for different justice principles and thereby shape reactions to diversity training. We also speculate on the value of studying multicultural beliefs in other areas of organizational justice beyond diversity training.