Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity
The Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity:
- Provides a thorough explanation for how individuals or teams tend to think and feel about cultural differences
- Provides the framework for a common language to converse about growth on the diversity and inclusion continuum
- Provides a path to support candid coaching and development to raise a leaders capability to connect, communicate, and build more authentic relationships across differences
DMIS was created by Dr. Milton Bennett. It is based upon years of extensive research and direct observation. DMIS provides a structure for understanding how people experience cultural differences.
Dr. Bennett outlines six stages of perspectives on how a person sees, thinks about, and interprets events, interchanges, conversations from an intercultural –difference perspective. In essence, it provides insight on how a person's own cultural patterns both enhance and limit their experience of cultural differences.
DMIS theory says that cultural sensitivity and cultural differences represent a potential obstacle or benefit in developing relationships and communicating effective with other people. As such this tool provides a multipronged approach to helping a leader learn how to unleash talent across differences in an effort to raise productivity, employee engagement and overall team and organization performance.
The six stages are broken into two subsets: three address how one's own culture is viewed as "better" referred to as "ethnocentric" and three address how one sees other cultures as "equal among many cultures" referred to as "ethnorelative".
The six stages are:
- Denial
- Defense Reversal
- Minimization
- Acceptance
- Adaptation
- Integration