Can Diversity Training Backfire?
As explained on page 267-268, an increasingly diverse workforce is causing many firms to implement diversity training programs. However, valuable as those diversity training programs can be, the recent experience at R.R. Donnelley (http://www.rrdonnelley.com) (the company that prints most of the phone books in the United States) provides an example of the sorts of problems that diversity training programs can trigger. Class action racial discrimination lawsuits and complaints have become so numerous at the company that The Wall Street Journal published an article in January 1997 describing Donnelley’s current situation. In some ways the problem Donnelley has run into is a sort of a road map for the problems to avoid with diversity training. For one thing, according to The Wall Street Journal report, although Donnelley has put a big emphasis on diversity training “the numbers” don’t look very good: in particular, since 1993, when Donnelley started its diversity initiative black employme
