Additional Case 4.3 Your Retail Company Has 80% of Its Stores Located in Stores

Multiple Choice

Additional Case 4.3
Your retail company has 80% of its stores located in downtown metropolitan areas. Your biggest stores are in communities where minorities represent 60% of your customers. Your middle-management team has been changing over time so that 50% of your managers are women and about 30% are ethnic minorities. A significant number of your hourly employees, about 35%, have served over 20 years in their respective stores and many are over 40 years of age. Top management feels that African-Americans are under-represented in the hourly workforce and in middle management. They want HR to initiate an aggressive recruitment process to address the situation.
Hispanics are the biggest minority group, besides women, in your workforce. In a discussion about where the company should target its diversity program, the CEO explains she wants to implement a training program for managers to raise their sensitivity to minorities, especially Hispanics. She also notes that there are no disabled persons in the workforce and very few Asian-Americans. Carlos, the VP of facilities, notes that he has accommodated all the Asian-American employees he can in his MIS and facility support services. He also argues that he only has about $10,000 in his budget for reorganizing display space in the stores to accommodate disabled employees and that this amount probably isn't sufficient to accommodate a disabled employee.
-Refer to Additional Case 4.3.What is a key issue for the CEO in implementing diversity training that would focus on understanding Hispanic culture?

A) Some will wonder why the program focuses on Hispanics, since this group is typically at a significant advantage due to high academic success rates.
B) Hispanics account for a small percentage of the U.S. workforce, and the group's numbers are decreasing rapidly because of immigration reform.
C) Hispanics tend to need additional educational assistance to be competitive due to impoverished backgrounds.
D) The term "Hispanic" is a misnomer, since there are actually very diverse subgroupings of Latinos.