An Investigation of Employee Attitudes Towards Training Effectiveness

An Investigation of Employee Attitudes Towards Training Effectiveness

LI Chun Yan1 LI Wei Ming2 School of AdministrationGuangdong Polytechnic Normal University, P.R.China (510665) 2 School of Business AdministrationSouth China University of Technology, P.R.China (510640)

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Abstract Little attention has been devoted to an assessment of the attitudes of employees towards the effectiveness of training investment. This study within a large university aims to explore the cleaning staff’s attitudes towards training effectiveness at four evaluation levels: reaction to training course, learning environment, behavior change and employee perceived training outcomes. Results of the study suggest that employees have positive attitude towards training effectiveness when management develop an integrated approach to training which place emphasis on the identification of training needs, the role of supervisors and reward system. Practical implication of the findings and future research are discussed. Key words employee attitudes, training effectiveness, evaluation

1 Introduction

Training can be defined as: ‘The systematic development of the attitude/knowledge/skill/behavior pattern required by an individual to perform adequately a given task or job’ (Bramley,1996:xvii). Over the past three year, the interest of investment in training has been increasing. Problematically, the mainstream training and HR literature has neglected the issue of how companies assess the effectiveness of training investments and in particular employees’ attitudes towards training effectiveness (Santos and Stuart, 2003:27). Because of this gap in the literature, this research project will be an exploratory research with attempt to present evidence from a detailed study designed to explore the cleaning staff’s attitudes towards the effectiveness of training in a large university that has a training policy in place. Due to time constraints, the purpose of present study will tend to explore the...