LITERATURE REVIEW

The Impact of Training Courses on Employee Satisfaction and Productivity



The Impact of Training Courses on Employee Satisfaction and Productivity

Literature Review

In recent years job satisfaction has received a great deal of attention from economists and policy makers. Traditionally, economists had distrusted the use of subjective and attitudinal variables, but early papers established that job satisfaction was related to a number of objective job features and was able to predict consequences such as absenteeism and quits (Borjas, 1979; Freeman, 1978; Hamermesh, 1977). In this paper we extend this analysis by addressing three main questions.

First, does training affect job satisfaction? Second, does training affect workplace performance either directly or indirectly through its effect on job satisfaction? Third, does job satisfaction affect performance, whether or not it is related to training? Training is one means of improving workforce utilization and thereby potentially raising job satisfaction. Either or both of these may impact favourably on establishment performance, and the purpose of this paper is to identify these mechanisms and their impact on various measures of performance.

The effect of training on job satisfaction

Most of the literature in this area has focused on the impact of education and skills on job satisfaction rather than the effect of training as such. One exception is Siebern-Thomas (2005) who, analysing 13 countries in the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) 1994-2001, found that job satisfaction tended to be higher where there was access to workplace training. The relationship between skill acquisition and job satisfaction is not straightforward. First, there is the distinction between general and specific skills. The portability of general skills may raise job satisfaction as it is easier to move to other jobs where satisfaction is higher.

In contrast, specific skills bind the worker to the firm and may reduce satisfaction by creating a barrier to exit as workers will lose a portion of the return on such skills if they move. This leads on to the question of the matching of individual skills and levels of education with job requirements. If workers are mismatched in terms of skill and education requirements, this may lower job satisfaction, as evidenced in the earlier literature. In fact, most studies have focused on over- and undereducation rather than over-skilling and under-skilling. Thus, Hersch found for the USA that over-educated workers were less satisfied than adequately educated workers (Hersch, 1991) and that over-educated workers received less on-the-job training, but were more likely to be promoted (Hersch, 1995). Yet Battu et al. (2000) found a negative relationship between over-education and promotion for UK graduates and no evidence of employers upgrading tasks given to the over-educated. The same authors found that over-educated graduates had significantly lower job satisfaction than those who were in graduate-level jobs (Battu et al., 1999). Green and Tsitsianis (2005) likewise found for a cross-section of workers that job satisfaction was lower for both over-educated and under-educated workers in their British sample, whereas for Belgium, Verhaest and Omey (2004) reported that after controlling for educational attainment, over-educated workers were ...