Building and assessing cultural diversity skills: Implications for series training

Despite the continued increase in cultural diversity in the marketplace, many sales and marketing executives are failing to interact successfully with their customers and employees from diverse cultural backgrounds. As a result, academics and practitioners have advocated cultural diversity training as a way to increase success. However, diversity training often is perceived as an unnecessary component of sales training programs. Salespeople may not realize the benefits of such training and thus go into culturally diverse situations with a false sense of security that can produce embarrassing and nonproductive results. The purpose of this article is to introduce a simulation exercise that can help eliminate these perceptions and aid in creating awareness in salespeople and managers about the importance of cultural diversity via their own self-assessment. Results of this simulation are reported with implications and recommendations for future research. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.