Training, development and careers in global context

  The degree to which an organization's human resource development activities succeed in differentiating staff competencies from rivals improves learning transfer among divisions and contributes to competitive advantage (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1992). To improve organizational performance and effectiveness, strategic human resource development has become an important aspect of human resource management. Human resource development is an important aspect of workforce planning operations that is linked to increased efficiency, product development, market share, and revenue (Koch and McGrath, 1996). Traditional human resource development practices are insufficient to address the changing needs of today's businesses. There is a strong need to switch from offering a limited set of technical skills to acquiring competencies in a growing number of areas. The ideal way to understand strategic human resource development is as a contingency approach. Much of the literature on strate...

  Recent studies have used structural and job characteristics, as well as employee demographics, to explain training engagement at the organizational level. However, reviewers claim that an individual's motivation for training should also play a role in their participation. Scholars contend that anticipating a valuable gain from education, is a critical antecedent to involvement (Ford and Noe, 1992), rather than the traditional measure of motivation to study. Learning motivation, self-efficacy, and motivation through expectation are the three categories of pre-training motivation. Learning motivation is a basic and direct technique to assess how trainees perceive their participation, nevertheless, it is transparent and provides very little diagnostic information, and explicates little about why certain trainees are more motivated than others (Mathieu and Martineau, 1997). In expectation-based motivation, employees are driven by the idea that their efforts to attend training will ...