Training And Development

Training and development



Introduction

Training and development remains an important human resource (HR) practice of interest to researchers, managers, governments, and employees. Training research is of substantial interest and reviews show its enormous and continued growth (e.g., Aguinis and Kraiger, 2009).Training is of major interest to practitioners and managers in order to update employee skills, improve job performance and productivity, and develop the competencies employees need to meet the strategic objectives of their organizations. Training is of significance to governments who facilitate its use to provide the capabilities a country needs for economic growth and to address skill shortages in a highly competitive global economy. Lastly, training is important to employees for whom it increases employment duration and continuity, pay, and career advancement.

However, problematic issues continue to arise in regard to the usefulness of and return on training and development. Managers want to know what the return is on their investment. Yet, the impact of training on performance continues to be rarely evaluated and its ROI rarely calculated. Scholars lament that practitioners do not use the results of research to incorporate the well-developed scientific knowledge about training into needs analysis, design, delivery, transfer, and evaluation. Governments are criticized for under investing in the training and development needed by their countries for economic growth.

This chapter provides an audit of the training and development literature and its issues and developments. Training is defined as the systematic acquisition and development of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required by employees to adequately perform a task or job or to improve performance in the job environment and as a planned effort by an organization to facilitate the learning of job-related behavior on the part of its employees. The chapter begins by considering the discipline approaches that underlie research on training. Then it examines the process of training by considering its stages: the pre-training stage (training needs analysis, factors predicting participation in training and development, the antecedent conditions to training effectiveness, training design), the training itself (training delivery); and the post-training stage (transfer of training, evaluation of the effects of training). The chapter closes with consideration of future development and research needs in the area.

Approaches Underlying Research into Training and Development

Four major approaches underlie research into training and development in organizations: those of human resource management (HRM), industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology, labor economics, and industrial relations (Kubeck, 1996, 107).

The earlier field of 'personnel management' considered training as one of several separate HR practices and focused on identifying and implementing training models in a series of steps to improve individuals' job performance. By contrast, in the HRM approach, HR practices, including training and development, are used to improve organizational performance, help implement an organization's business strategy and meet its objectives, and help build a sustainable competitive advantage that creates financial performance. The approach is strategic in terms of managing human resources to meet the organization's objectives.

The theoretical basis for the strategic HRM approach includes the resource-based view (RBV) of the ...