Age Diversity Training May Backfire

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Commerce and Business Administration May 30, 1997

Contact: Carol Kulik, 217-244-0208 [email protected]

Age Diversity Training May Backfire

Older job applicants may lose when todayís busy managers receive diversity training. Organizations offering diversity training to employees should proceed with caution, say researchers at the University of Illinois.

Does participation in diversity training increase the likelihood that managers will hire diverse applicants? Not necessarily, say Associate Professor Carol Kulik and Assistant Professor Elissa Perry of the University of Illinois. In fact some training may cause managers to evaluate nontraditional applicants more negatively than if the managers had not been involved in diversity training at all.

These researchers, along with Assistant Professor Anne Bourhis of Laval University, were interested in the effects of diversity training on hiring decisions. While many organizations are investing a large portion of their training budgets in video-based diversity training, few organizations have systematically examined the effects of this training on hiring decisions.

Professors Kulik, Perry, and Bourhis were particularly interested in the effects of diversity training on the hiring of older (55-60 year old) job applicants. "We wanted to find out if people who were trained in diversity issues would be more likely to hire an older job applicant. Since managers are often thinking about multiple tasks simultaneously, our study also examined the effects of multitasking on the hiring decisions," says Kulik.

Business students watched one of three videos. The first video presented information about age diversity in the U.S. labor market and recommended that managers try not to use information about applicant age in their hiring decisions. The second presented information about age, race, and gender diversity in the U.S. labor market and recommended that managers try not to use information about any of these dimensions in their hiring decisions. The third video did not provide any diversity training; instead, it recommended some innovative hiring practices including the use of video interviews.

After watching one of these videos, participants evaluated three applicants for a sales position. One of these applicants was an older (55-60 year old) woman. Prior to the evaluation, the researchers warned some of the business students that, later in the experimental session, they also would be interviewed for a sales job. As a result, these students simultaneously evaluated the job applicants and mentally prepared for their own interview.

Kulik says the study shows that "Neither of the diversity videos enhanced the studentsí evaluations of the older job applicant. Participants who had learned about age diversity, and participants who had learned about age, race, and gender diversity, were no more likely to hire the older job applicant than those who watched the video containing no diversity information." Therefore, the researchers caution that organizations should not expect video-based diversity training to have a positive impact on the hiring of diverse job applicants.

More importantly, the older applicant was least likely to be hired by, and received the lowest starting salary from, multitasking participants who had learned about age diversity.

Why would these students evaluate the older applicant so negatively? Kulik explains that the negative evaluations resulted from the drain on cognitive resources caused by multitasking. "When managers try to keep age from influencing their decisions, they use cognitive resources to monitor age-related thoughts and ëfilter outí these thoughts from their hiring decisions. If they donít have enough cognitive resources to complete the filtering process, their minds are flooded with the age-related thoughts they were trying to ignore and negative stereotypes associated with older applicants result in negative evaluations."

However, only the video focusing on age diversity had this negative effect. The researchers suggest that since the video focusing on age, race, and gender addressed a broader range of diversity dimensions, participantsí failure to effectively "filter out" all of these dimensions resulted in fewer age-related thoughts. Therefore, the researchers recommend that organizations implementing video-based diversity training use broad-based interventions rather than narrow ones addressing a single diversity dimension.

Organizations are likely to continue to offer diversity training to their employees. This research suggests that they should proceed with caution. Diversity training, especially training focused on a limited number of dimensions, may backfire. How can organizations avoid these problems?

Kulik and Perry suggest that organizations may be able to avoid the negative effects of diversity training by extending the length of training sessions. "When training sessions are longer," explains Kulik, "managers have more opportunity to practice new skills. As a new skill becomes routinized, it requires less cognitive resources to be performed successfully."

Professors Kulik and Perry teach courses in Human Resource Management and Managing Diversity at the University of Illinois. They have conducted extensive research on the effects of training on sexual harassment, and the effects of diversity on human resource decisions.

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