A field survey of factors affecting the adoption and perceived success of diversity training

Some 785 human resource professionals responded to a questionnaire about diversity issues in their organizations. Results revealed that both training adoption and perceived training success were strongly associated with top management support for diversity. In addition, training adoption was associated with large organizational size, positive top management beliefs about diversity, high strategic priority of diversity relative to other competing objectives, presence of a diversity manager, and existence of a large number of other diversity-supportive policies. Perceived training success was also associated with mandatory attendance for all managers, long-term evaluation of training results, managerial rewards for increasing diversity, and a broad inclusionary definition of diversity in the organization.