Attitudes towards diversity Evidence from business school students from Norway, India and the Czech Republic

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate diversity attitudes of business school students across three national contexts Norway; India and the Czech Republic. These three countries are dissimilar from one another in terms of values, such as individualism and collectivism (Hofstede, 2001) self-expression and secular-rationalism (Inglehart and Welzel, 2010) and inequality. The authors wanted to explore similarities and differences in diversity attitudes of respondents from these countries. Design/methodology/approach - Using the diversity attitude scale developed by De Meuse and Hostager (2001) the authors conducted comparative research and collected data from 234 business school graduate students. Findings - The authors found that all groups were positive towards diversity, however, there were significant differences in diversity attitudes between the countries. The Czech Republic had the most positive diversity scores and India the least positive. Research limitations/implications - This study used convenient samples of business students which might not be representative of the future management in these countries. However, the findings do suggest that attitudes towards diversity are generally positive across these very different national contexts. Practical implications - The findings suggest that in today's international context people are becoming more positive towards diversity - at least on the conceptual level and a bottom up approach from MNC to diversity management might be easier to implement than previously thought. The preliminary evidence from the study suggests that this first step of introducing diversity policies across national borders might not meet as much resistance as previously anticipated. Social implications - The movement towards seeing and accepting different others is moving in the right direction. Originality/value - To use this established diversity attitudes measure across three very different national cultures. In the literature there is a call for more comparative research on diversity management.