Building and assessing cultural diversity skills: Implications for series training

Despite the continued increase in cultural diversity in the marketplace, ma ny sales and marketing executives are failing to interact successfully with their customers and employees from diverse cultural backgrounds. As a resu lt, academics and practitioners have advocated cultural diversity training as a way to increase success. However, diversity training often is perceive d as an unnecessary component of sales training programs. Salespeople may n ot realize the benefits of such training and thus go into culturally divers e situations with a false sense of security that can produce embarrassing a nd nonproductive results. The purpose of this article is to introduce a sim ulation exercise that can help eliminate these perceptions and aid in creat ing awareness in salespeople and managers about the importance of cultural diversity via their own self-assessment. Results of this simulation are rep orted with implications and recommendations for future research. (C) 2000 E lsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.