CULTURAL TRAINING

Cultural Training



Executive Summary

Most organizations invest in people for training. Training effectiveness is arguably constrained because of inadequate transfer of learning from the training environment to the workplace environment. Training-job relevance and the extent of transfer have been found limited. Although performance is affected by a number of factors, training is often used as a solution to all problems. Trying to fix non-training problems with training solutions is futile, yet often attempted in the context of China and USA. Thus, the growing recognition of the problem of inadequate transfer of training has been recognized as a compelling issue. This article discusses “Cultural Training” which is very important for any company that is going to to expand globally.

Introduction

Cross-cultural training, also referred to as multicultural counseling competence training, denotes the process of instructing psychologists-in-training to work effectively across cultures in their practice and research activities. The term cross-cultural (or multicultural) has been defined in the counseling psychology literature in two distinct ways. One definition of cross-cultural is broad and inclusive of a wide variety of reference group identities (e.g., race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, social class). More traditional uses of the term, which emerged in the 1960s, were specific to different ethnicities, within and beyond the borders of the United States. On the basis of salience of race as a marker in the United States, many scholars during the 1980s and 1990s argued for a more specific definition of cross-cultural (multicultural) that focuses on domestic racial, ethnic, and linguistic minority groups. Because there has been increased attention to international issues in the field of counseling psychology during recent years (for instance, three of the five presidents of the Society for Counseling Psychology between 2003 and 2007 positioned counseling psychology in a global sphere), cross-cultural, for the purposes of this entry, refers to race and ethnicity within both domestic and international contexts.

Discussion

The rapidly changing demographics of the U.S. domestic population and the transnational reach of counseling psychology make cross-cultural training increasingly critical in the overall education of applied psychologists. However, despite the importance the American Psychological Association (APA) has placed on cross-cultural training and the growing percentages of people of color in the United States served by applied psychologists, clients from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds nonetheless continue to average fewer sessions, terminate more quickly, and utilize services less often than their non-Hispanic White counterparts. Racial and ethnic minority individuals oftentimes do not view counseling as addressing their needs, or perhaps untrained, culturally insensitive therapists leave too many minority clients feeling misunderstood. If clients are not considered within their sociocultural contexts as they understand and experience them, a host of potential negative implications might ensue with regard to case conceptualization (e.g., minimizing the importance of contextual factors), diagnosis (e.g., overpathologizing clients from different cultures on the basis of their different world-views), and treatment (e.g., difficulty establishing the therapeutic alliance, inappropriate interventions). Therapeutic services designed from a universalist framework—a theoretical approach based on White middle-class male values that assumes a set of universal laws of human functioning—may not be appropriate in contexts where diverse worldviews ...