INTRODUCTION
Research motivation
Employee engagement is increasingly becoming a vital concept which has been believed that it directly results in higher employee performance and organizational performance Mike Johnson (2004) wrote in his book named “The New Rules of Engagement” that “the ability to engage employees, to make them work with our business, is going to be one of the greatest organizational battles of the coming 10 years.”, which was a crucial prediction about the importance of employee engagement for the future of industries After that, several academic papers and practical reports have stressed employee engagement as an essential factor which may drive business outcomes In an article named as “Why Employee Engagement?”
(2012) on Forbes by Kruse, there are 28 academic studies had been reviewed that they show the correlations between employee engagement and numerous other aspects of business administration: service; sale; quality; safety; retention; sale, profit and total shareholder returns Singh (2016) in his own study stated that “For past several years, employee engagement has been an important concern in the corporate world.” According to that paper, organizations cannot get and sustain their loyal customers by products and process only, but also need “highly-motivated, dedicated and involved employees”, or employees who has high engagement, in other word
Thus, employee engagement in recent time has been widely and deeply investigated in by organizations and researchers, in order to get better understanding about it, hence can utilize it for better outcomes However, Gallup’s report showed that only 15% of employees are engaged at work in 2017 worldwide Such numbers indicate several chances for increasing level of engagement, thus generate higher outcomes
Since employee is the most valuable asset to organizations, it is obviously critical for companies to improve employee performance through types of training activities It is a key factor in organizational management It is seemed that training is one of the ways for organizations to enhance level of engagement of employees Annual reports on employee satisfaction and engagement by Society of Human Resources Management showed many conditions for employee engagement, including training and development However, training and development took account for almost the lowest position in the recent years (SHRM, 2015, 2016, 2017), despite the fact that several studies mentioned significant impacts of training on engagement
These indications suggest the need to have a deeper look at such relationship and become the significant motivations for conducting this study.
Research objectives
Basically, the objective of this research is to explore the link between employee training and employee engagement in current Vietnamese context According to a report about Employee Engagement & Retention in Vietnam (Towers Watson, 2010), in the period of 4 years from 2007 to 2010, the percentage of employee engagement in Vietnam had remained stable at around 78%, which was just ahead of the Asia Pacific Region Whereby, the possible reasons for this high level are management systems, employee perceptions on company image, effective performance evaluation, empowerment and sophistication However, Brands Vietnam – an electronic portal with high reputation in Vietnam, showed that this indication has declined considerably by about 10%, stayed at 70% in 2017, and even lower in 2015 and 2016
Although it still accounted for a good level in comparison with the level of the world and Asia, this decrease has been a warning for organizations in Vietnam Together with the number which is indicated by Gallup mentioned above, it is suggested that the employee engagement should be improved, and there have been several opportunities for enhancing the business as well as talent management for companies in Vietnam
Thus, based on the practical situation and previous academic studies, this paper aims to explain and explore the relationship of the two important Human Resources Management (HRM) aspects: employee training and employee engagement, in order to propose suggestions to improve the level of engagement for organizations in Vietnam, hence enrich the outcomes and performance for those companies.
Research scope and objects
Basically, the scope of the study will be employees who have working experience for a company in Vietnam and received training activities while working Besides, since the employee engagement is a psychological and behavioral term, it is understandable that other variables should be psychologically and behaviorally studied, from the view point of employee Particularly, this research has investigated in the perception and satisfaction of employees on the organizational training activities they received, their self-efficacy and perception on reward received from organization, in order to see the relationship between those factors on their perceived employee engagement
It will be discussed further on the next Chapter.
The structure of the paper
The paper starts with a chapter which provide an introduction for the study After that, it continues with 4 chapters of reviewing literature, method for study, data collection and analysis, and findings and conclusions Particularly:
Chapter 1 discusses about the introduction with research motivation, research objectives, scope and objects
Chapter 2 reviews and summarizes the previous papers which related to the variables in this study, as well as proposes research questions and hypotheses
Chapter 3 provides information about the approach method, research model and method of collecting data
Chapter 4 discusses the data analysis, and summarizes the results of the study
Chapter 5 concludes the work with the discussion about findings Besides, this chapter also states the limitation and suggestions for future studies.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Employee engagement
The definition of employee engagement, for nearly 3 decades of researching and developing, is still raising a controversy among researchers and organizations In other words, there still have no certain definition for this term, but it varied depends on how researchers and people look at it
The first time when the term “engagement” had been conceptualized was in 1990, by Kahn At that time, he defined engagement as “the harnessing of organization members’ selves to their work roles; in engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances”
According to Kahn, people with engagement are enabled to concomitantly express their preferred selves and completely satisfy their role requirements Kahn suggests three direct psychological conditions of meaningfulness, psychological safety and psychological availability as influencing employees’ engagement (May et al., 2004;
Generally, there were various determinations for employee engagement have been developed from the first time of conceptualization, and such term is still being controversy for academic researchers as well as organizations In the same year with Schaufeli’s UWES, Harter et al., had developed a conceptualization for employee engagement, using Gallup framework, as an “individual’s involvement and satisfaction with as well as enthusiasm for work” (Harter et al., 2002), which become one of the most cited pieces of practitioner literature (Liat Eldor, Eran Vigoda-Gadot,
2017) Saks argued to determine engagement as ‘a unique construct of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components… associated with individual role performance’
(Saks, 2006) In 2008, Macey and Schneider proposed a complicated taxonomy of employee engagement, which, according to them, is viewed as “a desirable condition, has an organizational purpose, and connotes involvement, commitment, passion, enthusiasm, focused effort and energy, so it has both attitudinal and behavioral components” It is easy to see that almost the developed definitions for employee engagement are related to individual psychology or behavior In fact, social aspect of engagement, which referred to the experience of connectedness with other people who could be colleagues but may be anyone that the work role provides an interface with (Kahn, 1990), was presented and acknowledged in scholars (Shuck and Wollard,
2010) (Soane et al., 2012) For example, Saks claimed that relationships with supervisors can be antecedents of engagement (Saks, 2006; cited by Soane et al.,
2012) Notwithstanding, “yet social engagement had not been conceptualized or operationalized as a facet of engagement” (Soane et al., 2012) until Soane’s study, which determined employee engagement consists of 3 facets: Intellectual Engagement - the extent to which one is intellectually absorbed in work; Affective Engagement - the extent to which one experiences a state of positive affect relating to one’s work role; and Social Engagement - the extent to which one is socially connected with the working environment and shares common values with colleagues
This paper, with the opinion of author that engagement requires both individual and social psychological, values and behavioral statements, will follow the definition of Soane et al., consider employee engagement as collect of 3 facets mentioned above
All of the term “employee engagement” from now can be understood this way
Studies on engagement also have been conducted with several findings In 1990, Kahn, with the purpose of exploring the conditions at work by which people personally engage and disengage, had identified three psychological conditions - meaningfulness, safety, and availability, which help explaining the variance in people's bringing to and leaving out of themselves in their work role performances
(Kahn, 1990) It is easy to see that Kahn at the beginning conceptualized engagement around the psychological aspects of human beings In 1992, Kahn proposed an expansion in theoretical issue of his work Such expansion delineates the concept of psychological presence, its dimensions (attentiveness, connectedness, integration, and focus), and their impact on personal engagement (Michelle R Simpson, 2009)
At that time, Kahn theorizes some factors that preceding the psychological conditions of meaningfulness, safety, and availability, consists of various work elements, social systems, and individual distractions Beside that conceptualization, his findings suggested that outcomes of personal engagement may include performance quality and productivity It means, when an individual finds his job meaningful, feels safe, and has the essential resources in their work role both externally and internally, personal engagement will be led to, and the individual is stated to be ‘‘fully present’’
(Kahn, 1992) In 2004, May et al., based on Kahn’s studies, conducted a research that proposed an individual engagement model at work Such research investigated in Kahn’s three psychological conditions, as well as put in various determinants of personal engagement such as job enrichment, relations, self-consciousness, activities or resources (May et al., 2004; Michelle R Simpson, 2009)
Follow another school of engagement, Maslach and Leiter in their study which aimed at examining how the six areas of work life and the three dimensions of burnout/engagement affect the perception of employee about the change within organization, found that there were a mediating effect of burnout/engagement that linked organizational context and organizational changes (Maslach and Leiter, 1997)
After that, several academic studies were built upon Maslach and Leiter’s finding, resulted in drives and consequences of engagement For instance, Laschinger and Finegan proposed three models suggest empowerment has indirect effects on burnout/work engagement through various areas of work life (Laschinger et al., 2005; Michelle R Simpson, 2009) One year later, burnout had been found that has partially mediating effect on the relationship between work life and adverse events
Whereby, a working environment which enabled higher support for professional practice, would lead to greater engagement (Leiter and Laschinger, 2006)
Schaufeli et al., with the definition of engagement consist of 3 components: vigor, dedication and absorption, in which vigor and dedication are two opposite components to burnout dimension (emotional exhaustion and cynicism), developed the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale in 2003, and used it to test the relationship between job resources, engagement and turnover intention The result suggested that work engagement mediated the link between job resources and turnover intention (Schaufeli et al., 2002, 2003, 2004) Moreover, since the measurement tool UWES were developed, “a growing body of research focusing on this construct has evolved”
(Michelle R Simpson, 2009) Simpson in his research stated that a number of studies emphasized at the antecedents and/or consequences of work engagement, in which, the organizational factors were illustrated that having a vital influence in predicting work engagement, but not individual factors One of the illustrations is the result of several studies, which pointed out that job resources significantly predicted work engagement (Hakenen et al., 2006; Llorens et al., 2006; Mauno et al., 2007; Schaufeli and Bakker, 2004; Xanthopoulou et al., 2007) Likewise, researchers found that employees who have higher level of control, reward, values, or better work life experience would be more engaged to work (Koyuncu, 2006)
Employee training
Training from long time ago has been viewed as a completely essential aspects in making the organization profitable Landy gave out a definition that job training is “a set of planned activities on the part of an organization to increase the job knowledge and skills or to modify the attitudes and social behavior of its members in ways consistent with the goals of the organization and the requirements of the job” (Landy,
Job resources Perceived support for participation in HRD practices
Training perception Servant leadership Transformational leadership Incivility
Work role behavior Turnover intention Organizational knowledge creation Outcome variables (in-role performance, turnover intentions, OCB) Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB)
Discretionary effort Perceptions of HRD practices
1985) Michel Armstrong in another definition, said that “Training is systematic development of the knowledge, skills and attitudes required by an individual to perform adequately a given task or job” (Armstrong, 2001) More recently, Ross Holland (2012) has stated that training is “any planned activity to transfer or modify knowledge, skills, and attitude through learning experiences Personnel may require training for variety of reasons, including the need to maintain levels of competence and respond to the demand of changing circumstances and new approaches and technologies” Training primarily linked to the improvement and upgradation of the skills and knowledge of the employees and focuses on employee behavior at large to improve current and future state of job performance (Malik et al., 2013)
In this study, the perception of employee satisfaction on the training activity that they participate in at the workplace will be considered as an independent variable and be investigated to find out its correlations with other variables Schmidt in his work combined the two definitions of employee training (Landy, 1985; Patrick, 2000) and employee job satisfaction (Spector, 1997) into a term “job training satisfaction”, which is defined by himself as how people perceive about the job training they receive (Schmidt, 2007) Conducted researches also showed related result about training perception For example, a favorable relationship between employee work training and their commitment with the company Accordingly, HRD should “adapt new research methods to demonstrate to organizational decision makers that training and development contributes to desired workplace attitudes… which may in turn influence behaviors such as absenteeism and turnover” (Bartlett, 2001; cited by Schmidt, 2007) In the study of training for new employees, Tannenbaum et al (1991) stated that positive or negative attitudes and impressions which employees may have will depends strongly on their job training at workplace Schmidt in his work also cited suggestion that “a large part of the worker’s sense of job satisfaction can be attributed to workplace learning opportunities” (Rowden and Conine, 2003) Finally, he found that employee satisfaction about job training highly correlated to overall job satisfaction with the scope of employees was working in customer contact positions
Besides, he recommended that this correlation is proper among variety of occupational fields
Employees minds and behavior within organizations are under a considerable impact of their perception on training (Mohammed, 2017) Beforehand, there was a notation that more positively employees perceive training activities in their workplace, more greatly they achieve the level of motivating effect for taking training (Ahmad and Bakar, 2003) In the same work they said that the investment which organization put in training will facilitate them to get higher level of commitment from their employees It is considered as one of the most vital individual perceptions which influence to attitudes and behaviors (Guest, 2002) The success of training activities will strongly depend upon not just employee’s individual personality but also their perception about its benefits or outcomes (Burke and Hutchins, 2007) Additionally, employee perception about training was suggested to be varied by different ways due to the differences in experience and thoughts about its purposes (Nishi, Lepak, and Schneider, 2008) There has academical demonstration indicated that such perception has considerable impacts on productivity, performance and level of engagement (Paul et al., 2003; Kuvass et al., 2009; Salanova, 2005)
Particularly, employee training is studied and referred as a vital part of HR practices for creating improvement for work and organizational outcomes and employee behavior There are several papers studied the impacts of training on the performance of the employees A study in 2013 examined the influence of training on performance and presented that “organizational performance is significantly determined by training imparted to the employees” Accordingly, training is an important antecedent of performance (Zahid, 2013) In the same year, Nassazi conducted a study about the impact of training on employee performance in a Uganda telecommunication company The results reported that training and development have an impact on the performance of employees with regards to their jobs (Nassazi, 2013) There were also positive attitudes had been found towards the influence of training to the employees working performance, despite some constraints which control some of the effects of the training activities (Mohammed Al-Mzary et al., 2015) The similar effect was also indicated by works of several other researchers, that training significantly positively drives employee performance (Elnaga et al., 2013; Aragón, 2014; Amadi, 2014)
Besides, training has been found that it affects employee satisfaction Chepkosgey et al., proposed a framework of relationship between various types of training program and employee satisfaction and working attitude His work found out that “training had a great impact on the job satisfaction and retention of the employees” and “is essential in keeping employees apt in their work so that they can gain satisfaction from it.” (Chepkosgey et al., 2015) Training has strongly positively influenced to employee job satisfaction (Taormina, 1999; Garcia, 2005) This statement also was supported by work of Okechukwu, which proved the hypothesis that the relationship between training and employee satisfaction was clearly illustrated (Okechukwu,
2017) Additionally, paper of Truitt indicated a significant support for the hypothesis that “adequate job training is related to positive attitudes about job proficiency and that having adequate job training is related to positive attitudes about job training”
Training and its positive effects on employee attitude and proficiencies create long- lasting stakeholders and could serve as the binding force for business success during trouble times (Truitt, 2011)
Although there has number of researches investigated components of human resources management practices, and its connection with level of engagement of employees, few studies have been found which studied direct influences of individual
HR functions, to such important concept (Suan, 2014; Salanova, 2005; cited by Ahmed, 2015) According to Ahmed et al (2015), employee training is empirically found prominent in influencing turnover intentions, organizational citizenship behavior (Skarlicki, 1997), commitment and motivation (Sahinidis, 2008), performance (Frayne, 2000; Palmen, 2013), post-training organizational commitment, job satisfaction (Schmidt, 2007) Demerouti et al (2010) emphasized that training helped the employees to modify their behaviors, emotions to enhance their skills and competencies It is related to engagement Simultaneously, employee training has also been empirically tested with employee engagement, but mainly just as part of HRM practices and not so direct (Ahmed et al., 2015) Salanova (2005) has found that organizational resources, including training factor, had strong impacts on employee engagement In another research, Luthan (2010) found that training intervention significantly increased both the level of performance and psychological capital, which consists of engagement behavior
Employee training and employee engagement
There are few previous studies empirically investigated directly in the relationship between employee training and employee engagement In the research which exploring engagement behavior among more than hundred employees in a Malaysian hotel, the result has shown a strong influence to the engagement level resulted from training activities (Salanova et al., 2006) With the same concept, it is suggested that work engagement can be enhanced through improving on the service trainings provided (Suan et al, 2014) In 2015, Fletcher, in order to explore the mediating effects of both personal role engagement and work engagement on the relationship between training perceptions and work role behaviors, and compare the degrees of two engagements His finding showed that personal role engagement has a stronger effect on the relationship between training perceptions and task proficiency as well as training perceptions and task adaptability However, there is no difference between the mediating effects of the two engagements on the relationship between training perceptions and task proactivity (Fletcher, 2015) Training could predict employee engagement through its content and benefit that employees perceived It was able to be concluded that the essential relationship which connect training and engagement has been highlighted in some of the previous human resources management (HRM) related studies In other words, training activities may help organization to enhance the level of engagement at work Study of Ahmed et al., investigated the link between training and engagement, and proposed a model which indicates such relationship In that model training variable was categorized into 4 components including need assessment, training design, trainer and delivery, and evaluation By conceptually conducting, he found that all of the components have positive relations with post- training employee engagement and thus concluded that “employee training will be positively related with post-training employee engagement” (Ahmed et al., 2015)
Figure 2.2 Training components and employee engagement model
Although there were number of studies investigated employee training and its relationship with employee engagement from the past which indicated the positive impact, recent researches, however, released some inconsistent results Semwal et al
(2017) conducted study from a sample of 127 employees in IT companies and indicated that training vitally contribute to all components of engagement
Notwithstanding, in the effort to find the impact of training and development on engagement from Pakistani banking sector, Ezam et al., (2018) failed to reject the
Evaluation Training Components Training Design Need Assessment
Post-Training Employee Engagement hypothesis that “training has no significant impact on employees’ engagement” In other words, training which employees received might not gather high level of employee engagement (Ezam et al., 2018) Such results seem to be associated with the report results provided by Gallup and SHRM mentioned in the first Chapter
As mentioned above, the results of recent studies about such relationship were inconsistent Not just that, several newspaper articles and reports by different organizations has indicated the weak connection between training and employee engagement The inconsistency in the results may be caused by different contexts of sample, or different in working fields to be more specific Together with studies have been reviewed in the previous sections, it is indicated that the results are limited in terms of generalizability In other words, there is a gap in literature since studies mainly focused on single working field or single country Therefore, the findings of this paper may propose a different view on employee engagement in the context of Vietnam Besides, although there has papers which conduct the link between training and engagement, there were very few studies which investigate training as a single individual function, but as a component of HRD have been found Consequently, the result of relationship between those two variables may be affected by employees’ perception on other HRD components Another possible reason of this inconsistency is that the relationship between employee training and employee engagement may be affected by some other relating factors Base on above assumptions, there are two other variables have been introduced in this paper, with the purposes of testing their different effects on the link between training and engagement Specifically, self- efficacy and reward will be tested whether they have mediating effect and moderating effect respectively on such relationship Since the results found by academic researchers and organizations have conflicted themselves, there might a suggestion that different context will illustrate different influences to the research objects as well as the results Consequently, at first the link between employee training and employee engagement will be tested in this paper, in order to explore their relationship within Vietnamese workplace
H1: Employee training positively influence employee engagement.
Self-efficacy
Definition of self-efficacy is given by Bandura (1977), which considered self-efficacy as the belief of individuals in their ability to perform a given task and to meet situational demands According to Bergh and Theron (1999) cited in Stadler and Kotze (2006), self-efficacy determines whether a person will pursue a specific goal and how much effort will be put into attaining the stated objective
Self-efficacy has three dimensions: magnitude, the level of task difficulty a person believes she can attain; strength, the conviction regarding magnitude as strong or weak; and generality, the degree to which the expectation is generalized across situations (Fred C Lunenburg, 2011) The higher the level of self-efficacy, the more likely the individual will be motivated to persevere in attaining the objective, even if there are obstacles impeding him/her An employee’s sense of capability influences his perception, motivation, and performance (Bandura, 1997)
Bandura pointed out three ways that self-efficacy can influences learning and performance First, it has impacts on the employees’ goals selection in working, which might be at low level if they have low self-efficacy, and reversely Besides, self-efficacy affects employees’ learning behavior and their endeavors they put into the job Thirdly, employee perseverance in attempting and adapting to new or troublesome missions is also influenced by their perception of self-efficacy The higher level of self-efficacy, the more confident they are in perceiving and practically performing and tasks Thus, they will be more persistent in solving the difficulties (Bandura, 1982) All there effects above may significantly drive the quality of performance of employees
Due to the importance of self-efficacy at work, it is essential to determine what lead to it In 1997, Bandura proposed a model of sources of self-efficacy Accordingly, there are four key factors that result in individual self-efficacy, including:
Past performance – the most important source which may provide employees the confidence It is assumed that workers who have been successful in their previous job-related work will be more likely to have high self-efficacy
Vicarious experience – this supposed that one’s self-efficacy can be generated by seeing other person or co-worker’s success in doing tasks It is suggested that this source will work best when ones see others who have similar attributes, characteristics or abilities
Verbal persuasion – employees’ level of self-efficacy might be increase by persuading them that they have great qualification to complete the tasks, based on the Pygmalion effect, the phenomenon whereby expectation of people can influence the performance of a particular person Studies showed that employees may perform more greatly when their supervisors or managers believe that they can do successfully
However, the effectiveness of this source may be varied depends on various conditions (Lunenburg, 2011)
Emotional cues – Bandura argued that if employee find something not suitable in his task, or expect failure, will be likely to get some physiological symptoms Such symptoms may different depending on individuals, but normally they will lead to low outcomes
Figure 2.3 Sources of Self-efficacy (Source: Bandura, 1997)
It might be realized that all of the sources in this model have strong link with employee training For example, training enable employees doing their tasks under the guidance and supervision of the trainers, hence they could have chance to perform without considerable mistakes, or have chance to fix the wrong thing immediately
Thus, past performance would be generated, and it will be even good performance thank to the training, finally can raise self-efficacy Besides, training can provide employee vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and positive feeling about their ability and the task, via several types of activities such as discussing, observing or experiencing Generally, training in the workplace could help employees increase their perception of self-efficacy
According to Bandura (1986, 1997), self-efficacy beliefs are characterized as being task- or domain-specific and are suggested to motivate better performance in several ways First, self-efficacy beliefs affect feelings of competency and confidence in one’s perceived skill to perform a required task, which means they strive to reach their goals Next, self-efficacy beliefs motivate better performance by increasing the sense of control or agency an individual has over one’s life circumstances
Additionally, self-efficacy beliefs concern a perception that effort will lead to
Self-efficacy successful out-comes, which increases the individual’s ability to sustain effort when pursuing goals (Carter et al., 2016) In the series of papers that discovering the power of self-efficacy by Lorente, the results indicated the association of self-efficacy with numerous important variables Self-efficacy positively related to job and personal resources, which in turn result in engagement, among construction workers; self- efficacy and work engagement play the role of mediators in the relationship of transformational leadership and extra-role working performance (Lorente, 2009) The study by Frayne and Geringer (2000) empirically examined the role of self-efficacy in mediating the relationship between self-management training and job performance
Such researchers noted that self-efficacy partially mediated the relationship between self-management training and two of the performance measures was very important for theory and practice (Carter et al., 2016) Besides, Carter (2016) in his research stated that there are considerable conceptual parallels between self-efficacy and employee engagement, in the construction of individual motivations and mentioned it as an overlap Then, his findings showed that self-efficacy and employee engagement independently positively affect the outcomes of performance, however the effects will vary depends on the nature of task and the performance appraisal measurement High-level of self-efficacy may differ the results and consequences both positively and negatively based on different activities and behaviors (Lorente,
2009) Besides, several studies have found a significant and consistent relationship between self-efficacy and employee personal behavior in several aspects such as sales (Peterson & Byron, 2008), proactive behavior (Parker, Williams, & Turner, 2006), and work-related performance (Stajkovic & Luthans, 1998) (Carter et al., 2016) For instance, lacking of self-efficacy was illustrated as a vital factor which caused the negative feelings of employees in their workplace, thus raised the level of depression and anxiety (Schwarzer, 1999 cited by Ventura et al., 2015), and finally burnout (Cherniss, 1993; Llorens, García, & Salanova, 2005), consequently In contrast, high level of self-efficacy drives optimistic behavior and emotion, which facilitate the employee engagement (Llorens, Schaufeli, et al., 2007; Salanova, Llorens, et al., is under the mediating impacts of employees’ perception of work and family demand, and work – life balance In particular, work – family demand negatively significantly mediated the link between self-efficacy and work – life balance; but the positive effect was found with the mediating role of work – life balance which influence the relationship between self-efficacy and employee engagement (Wen et al., 2017)
Beforehand, in 2007, Xanthopoulou indicated that self-efficacy, as one of three personal resources, had mediating effect on work engagement Moreover, a research found that self-efficacy plays a vital role in predicting the perception of employees on challenge and hindrance demands, which are strongly related to burnout and engagement Particularly, the more self-efficacy employees have, the more they will engage to work, and conversely (Ventura et al., 2015)
Reward
Due to the diversity of classifications, this study follows the definition of reward which is the combination of the works of Pitts Collins and Schermerhorn et al., which in particular considers reward as:
“Reward is the benefits that arise from performing a task, rendering a service or discharging a responsibility.” (Collins, 1995), which can be categorized into 2 types: intrinsic reward and extrinsic reward “Intrinsic rewards are valued outcomes received as internal enjoyment of task performance”; “Extrinsic rewards are valued outcomes received from an external source or person” (Schermerhorn et al., 2014)
Motivation, including reward, is an essential component in building employee engagement and several related aspects, for the final purpose of enhancing performance and generating organizational outcomes The Institute for Employment Studies (IES) identified a model of employee engagement, in which engagement is the combination of three components: commitment, motivation and organizational citizenship behavior According to IES, employee who engage will highly believe in their organizations and consider their work for making organizations better
Equal opportunities and fair treatment Engagement
Pay and benefits Health and safety Co-operation Family friendliness
Figure 2.4 Engagement Diagnostic Tool: National Health Service (Source: Robinson et al., 2004, Institute for Employment Studies)
Previous results of studies provided by numerous researchers and organizations also show that reward in many types can be an important practice that drive employee engagement and organizational performances “Individual performance-related pay and profit-related bonuses” were referred to 2 of 18 HRD practices which influence performance and commitment of employees (Guest, 2003) Team rewards and
Feeling valued and evolved incentive pay were found as the important factors which are associated with high performance (Thompson, 2000)
Besides, IES studied the National Health Service in UK and indicated that pay and benefits, and opportunities, considerably affect employee engagement (Robinson et al - IES, 2004) Also, in this year, there had a study show that the link between pay and work-related performance put a significant impact on employees’ intention to give discretionary effort to work (Corporate Leadership Council, 2004) Engagement and commitment are also under the strong impacts of fair pay (Heintzman and Marson,
2005) Performance pay is illustrated as one the causes of engagement among top performers of organization (WorldatWork, 2004) WorldatWork also proposed a model of total reward system, which indicate multi-directional relationships among the variables of organizational practices, reward, satisfaction, engagement and performance, in which the role of total reward is centralized and highly appreciated
Figure 2.5 Total reward system (Source: WorldatWork journal, 2008)
Reward, in its relationship with engagement, is also empirically studied by several researchers Koyuncu et al (2006) in the effort to examine potential antecedents and consequences of work engagement, conducted research with a sample of 286 women managers and professionals at Turkish bank and found that Work-life experiences, consists of rewards, predicted work engagement In determining whether there is a
Attract Motivate Retain relationship between rewards, trust and engagement in South African workplace, reward is tested that can be able to predict trust and engagement (Victor et al., 2016)
Additionally, total reward system is demonstrated that having a small-to-moderate correlation with employee engagement; and it is difficult to conclude that which category of total reward had the most effect on engagement (Hoole et al., 2016)
Especially, using both intrinsic and extrinsic reward can help organizations elevate the rate of employee engagement (Ram and Prabhakar, 2011) Similar result was also found out even earlier by Roberts and Davenport, that a workplace where reaps more kinds of rewards will be able to generate engagement among their employees (Roberts et al., 2002) In a study about the relationship between intrinsic reward and employee engagement in South African, the result showed that there had a considerable correlation between the two variables, and such correlation vary under the impacts of some control variables such as gender or age Godday et al (2013) studied 273 bank employees and found that extrinsic rewards had more impacts related to job satisfaction than intrinsic rewards More recently, Khan et al.’s study
(2017) findings expressed that both intrinsic and extrinsic reward positively influence employee performance; but intrinsic reward has higher effect; and no correlation between extrinsic and intrinsic reward
Appropriate reward is significant in enhancing employee engagement (Saks, 2006)
In other words, if reward being perceived appropriate by employees to their ability, will motivate them to be more engaged and give more effort Employees will feel that their ability and performance being highly appreciated by the organization, and thus engage more with the work when reward is at right place Previous studies recommended that various reward systems which organizations apply will essentially positively affect to employee attitude and behavior at work in different ways (Maister;
Guthrie, cited by Waal & Jansen, 2013) For example, employees who is paid out stock and dividend will feel highly involved and engaged because their benefit will stick to organizational performance; or they will feel more responsible and decisive if the reward system enable them to strengthen their competencies and make decision themselves Researchers also suggest that reward which is perceived as fair among employees and proportional to their contributions and organizational outcomes will motivate employees to commit, engage and exert in the workplace (Jackson, Rossi, Hoover, and Johnson, 2012) The more fairly the employee believes they are rewarded, the greater level of engagement he or she will have in the jobs, and go further beyond the routine expectations to achieve higher performance and outcomes (Chebat et al., 2002) In result, reward is indicated as a great important motivation mechanism in improving employee behavior and attitude, which help support organizational goals (Haal-Ellis, 2014; Waal and Jansen, 2013)
From the results of various academic works, it may be concluded that the diversification of employees’ perception on how they are rewarded will differ their feelings, their engagement, and their attitude and behavior at work, based on their self-beliefs on ability and contributions, as well as the job and organizational resources that they perceived Consequently, reward has been selected to be a moderator for testing its impacts on the link between employees’ perception of training and employee engagement
H3: Reward moderates the impact of training perception on employee engagement, that this impact will be stronger when employees’ perception of reward becomes more positive.
Research questions
This study is conducted primarily aiming at answering below research questions:
What is the relationship between employee training and employee engagement in Vietnamese workplace context?
Are there any impacts from self-efficacy and reward on the relationship between employee training and employee engagement separately?
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Research design
The quantitative research approach is specialized in “testing objective theories by examining the relationship among variables” (Creswell et al., 2018) These variables can be respectively statistically measured and analyzed in form of numbers, by using some kinds of instrument and statistical procedure The objective of this paper is explaining the relationship between variables: employee training perception and employee engagement, and through reviewing previous literatures, the author wants to explore more such relationship under impact of other factors, driving several assumptions and hypotheses which are proposed to be tested deductively Thus, based on the viewpoint of Creswell et al, the quantitative approach is suitable for conducting this study Quantitative methodology has been chosen for using in this paper, in terms of collecting and analyzing primary data Besides, background theories would be completed by secondary data, which were descriptive, explanatory and literature review
Among several ways of research design, survey research is chosen for conducting this paper “Survey research provides a quantitative or numeric description of trends, attitudes, or opinions of a population by studying a sample of population.” (Creswell,
2018) In this study, the author has the intention to collect data about perception and opinion of employee on their training received, their self-efficacy, reward and level of engagement, in order to investigate the relationships among them Hence, survey research is considered as the most suitable approach A survey using questionnaire which including a number of close-ended questions, or items, would be distributed to the citizens who meet the requirement mentioned in “Scope of the study” part
Collected data would be analyzed using SPSS software The results and analyses will be discussed later in chapter 3.
Conceptual research model
In this study, the proposed conceptual research model was a moderated mediation model with 4 variables: perception on training satisfaction, self-efficacy, reward and employee engagement The previous papers were reviewed to describe the variables and their theoretical characteristics, as well as their related issues This approach enables the authors to get and provide better understanding about them within the available evidences, as well as generate some assumptions in order to proposed the conceptual framework and hypotheses
Various scales of measuring training satisfaction were developed by different researchers from the past In this study, the instrument used for measuring this variable is adopted from The Job Training and Job Satisfaction Survey (JTJSS) which developed and used in the works of Schmidt (2007) The JTJSS was originated from Job Satisfaction Survey (Spector, 1997) and was adjusted by Schmidt for his studies
The scale used in this study consists of 8 items which measure the overall satisfaction of employee about training activity they received on the job and the support of organization for such training activity, by using 5-point Likert scale The examples of item are “Overall, the training I receive on the job meets my needs.”, “Overall, I am satisfied with the amount of training I receive on the job.” or “In my department, learning is planned and purposeful rather than accidental.” Originally, the JTJSS uses 6-point Likert scale to measure items Results of studies which comparing the different range of Likert scale showed that according to the construct validity, it was considered not different in number of components between 6-point or 5-point Likert scale (Chomeya, 2010); or there is a similarity between those two ranges of scale in terms of statistical information such as mean, standard deviation, correlation, reliability or validity (Leung, 2011) Besides, a forum hosted by Infosurv – a research service organization – found that the 5-point scale is more preferred, with the agreement of 71% of researchers who participated in They claimed that the 5-point scale has nice midpoint that indicates the neutral opinion, which is a “legitimate opinion that exists among respondents.” The lack of neutral point may lead to the biases of the respondents, since they are forced to choose either positive or negative side (Infosurv, 2006) For those reasons, the author of this paper decided to choose 5-point scale to use for measuring the training satisfaction
From the late of 20 th century, researchers become keen on the term general self- efficacy (GSE), “a more trait-like generality dimension of self-efficacy” (Chen et al.,
2001) Judge, Erez et al (1998) gave a definition of GSE that “individuals’ perception of their ability to perform across a variety of different situations” Among several scales developed to measure GSE, the works by Sherer et al (1982) seems to be the most widely used scale (Chen et al., 2001) Chen’s work developed a new GSE scale (NGSE) as well as compared his own tool to SGSE through 3 studies and found that NGSE has higher advances in terms of both reliability and validity, although it is shorter Moreover, in the work for comparing 3 of GSE scales including NGSE, the result indicated a considerable strength of NGSE related to the discrimination, information of item and relative efficiency (Charles et al., 2006) Hence, the author decided to use NGSE to measure self-efficacy The scale includes 8 5-point Likert scale items, such as “I will be able to achieve most of the goals that I set for myself.” or “When facing difficult tasks, I am certain that I will accomplish them.”
For measuring perception on reward, this study uses the scale which develop by works of Kuvaas et al (2006, 2009) and Dysvik et al (2013), and those scales was adopted by Kuvaas et al (2017) in order to investigate the difference in effects between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to employee outcome The scale consists there has 6 items, and 4 items for extrinsic reward (ER) All items are evaluated follow 5-point Likert scale The example items are “The tasks I do at work are enjoyable.” or “My job is meaningful.” for intrinsic type and “It is important for me to have an external incentive to strive for in order to do a good job.” for extrinsic type
The ISA engagement scale, which is developed by Soane et al (2012), was adopted to use in this paper According to Soane and colleagues, there has three conditions for engagement: focus is provided, activation, and positive affect; simultaneously there has three dimensions of engagement: intellectual engagement (IE), affective engagement (AE) and social engagement (SE), as mentioned in the last chapter (Soane et al., 2012) Thus, Soane’s work developed the ISA engagement scale based on those proposals Originally, the scale has 9 items with 7-point Likert scale, divided equally into 3 above facets of engagement The examples items are “I focus hard on my work.”, “I share the same work values as my colleagues.” and “I feel positive about my work.” The validation process revealed that ISA engagement scale could be more beneficial than one of the most widely used instrument for measuring engagement – UWES – in terms of individual-level behavior prediction (Fletcher and Robinson, 2014)
This study, however, adjusted from 7-point to 5-point scale to measure this variable
A study indicated that the 5-point scale is highly recommended due to the decrease of the frustration level of respondents and increase response rate and response quality (Sachdev, S B., & Verma, H V., 2004) Besides, Dawes, J (2008) stated that with a 5-point scale, it is quite simple for the interviewer to read out the complete list of scale descriptors
H1: Employee training positively influence employee engagement
H2: Employee’s self-efficacy positively mediates the relationship between employee training and employee engagement
H3: Reward moderates the impact of training perception on employee engagement, that this impact will be stronger when employees’ perception of reward becomes more positive
Population, sample and data collection
After reviewing carefully previous literature, the author designed questionnaire and constructed the survey based on the studies in the past, which was proved in terms of reliability and validity of variables The questionnaire consists of 6 sections:
The first section including 2 yes/no questions, which are used to aim at eliminating the unsuitable respondents who have not worked or received any training activity before December 2018
The second section including some demographic questions, which ask respondents to provide some individual information about age, gender, highest position at work, and average income
The next sections were used to ask respondents to rate their agree or disagree level on various items about training perception, self-efficacy, perception on reward, and engagement to measure those variables The range of the scale is from 1 to 5, in which point 1 indicates “totally disagree” and point 5 indicates “totally agree” Based on that, respondents will choose which point is the most suitable for each item, in their opinion The original version of items is in English, and it is translated to Vietnamese
Translate back process was also applied for reconfirming that those translated items are understood right way compare to the original version The collected data was linked to an excel spreadsheet and be kept confidential as commitment of the author
The begin of the questionnaire contains introduction to the research, including a declaration of statement of purpose and acknowledgement, thus make the respondents being clear about the objective of the survey as well as the research Each following section is also begun with introduction of its main purpose and the brief instruction for the respondents At the end of the survey, a thank-you statement was attached for expressing author’s gratitude to the respondents
The pilot test also applied for this questionnaire 10 respondents were asked for not only answering the questions but also commenting on the content and the difficulties they met while the answer Thank to that, some items were modified for more easily understanding
The population of this research is employees who is currently working or used to work in the creative industry in organizations located in Vietnam, and received training activity while working There is one more condition that the received training activity happened before December 2018, since the author believe that employees need time to convert what they gained from training into valuable skills and knowledge
Sample and data collection process
The author uses nonprobability sampling method, “in which respondents are chosen based on their convenience and availability” (Creswell et al., 2018) Since the author decided to distribute questionnaire survey online, this method is the most suitable In this research, email and social network are selected to use for distributing survey to gather data from respondents The survey is designed in online form by using Google’s platform Particularly:
Through email: the survey was delivered to emails of 220 representatives of organizations in Vietnam, with invitation letter and the short URL of the online survey, that kindly ask the individuals in charge of those emails respond carefully
By this way, 15 valid responses were collected, with the response rate of 6.8%
Through social network: The URL of the survey was posted on the different types of social network such as Facebook, LinkedIn… with a kind request of responding The main target for posting is the communities of people who are interested in creative industry (marketing, design…), business forums or recruiting groups There were 157 responses, but 20 among of them are invalid since the respondents have not
Thus, after three weeks, in total there has 152 valid responses were received, and the author used that data for the analysis of this paper.
Sample demographics
Table 3.1: Frequency of demographic information of respondents
Under 25 From 25 to 30 From 31 to 40 From 41 to 50 Over 50
Staff Supervisor Department manager Top manager
Less than VND 5,000,000 VND 5,000,000 to 10,000,000 VND 10,000,000 to 20,000,000 Over VND 20,000,000
DATA ANALYSIS
Data preparation
As discussed in chapter 3, data from 153 valid response answers was gathered via online channel by tool of Google Docs, then was computed into an Excel spreadsheet file After that, the data was transfer to SPSS data file for processing and analyzing
Table 4.1 indicate the coding of variables
Descriptive statistics
Table 4.2 illustrates the descriptive statistics of all items which measure the four variables Particularly, the mean ranges from 3.34 to 4.26, indicating a high value of agreement to the items in the survey The minimum values correspond to 2 items in both intrinsic and extrinsic reward, and the maximum value is at an item in extrinsic reward For the standard deviation, it varies between 0.701 and 1.191; and the value range is from 0.491 to 1.419 for variance
Table 4.2: Descriptive statistics of all variables
Construct Variable Minimum Maximum Mean Std
Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Std
Reliability and validity
At first, the reliability of data was examined, in order to check the correlation between items which measure one variable The level of reliability for items is represented by the Cronbach alpha co-efficient values Since the reward perception and employee engagement were divided into 2 and 3 sub-dimensions respectively, the Cronbach’s alpha was also tested for each sub-variable The test of reliability is processed using SPSS and the overall result is as below:
Table 4.3: Overall Cronbach’s alpha for each variable and sub-variable
Variable No of item Acceptable level Cronbach’s alpha
Overall, the Cronbach’s alpha of items for each variable is higher than the acceptable level However, when testing the Corrected item – Total correlation value of item IR1 is 0.308, lower than 0.4, indicating that this item has low level of reliability in correlation with other items which measure Intrinsic reward Thus, the author decided to remove this item from the item list The detail is showed in table 4.4
Table 4.4: Item-total statistics for Intrinsic reward variable
Hence, after processing reliability test, there was one item deleted, and the total number of items become 34
For testing the validity of items, the author used Kaiser – Meyer – Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett’s test, with the principle components method of extraction and varimax rotation According to the result, the KMO measure of sampling adequacy is equal to 0.860 and sig value is 0.000, indicating the adequacy for further analysis
Additionally, the rotated component matrix shows that items are suitable for measuring variables with the indicators greater than 0.5
Scale Mean if Item Deleted
Scale Variance if Item Deleted
Cronbach's Alpha if Item Deleted
Pearson correlation
The result of Pearson correlation analysis have been indicated in table 4.6 According to the result, the correlations between the dependent variable – employee engagement and other variables are significant with the considerable correlation coefficient of greater than 0.4 This illustrates it is statistically reasonable to select those variables for testing their impact on employee engagement Furthermore, all the variables has correlation with each other with the 2-tailed significance level at 0.01, indicating that the chosen variables for testing mediating and moderating effect are acceptable.
Regression analysis and hypotheses testing
H1: Employee training positively influence employee engagement
Regression analysis was explored in order to examine the relationship between training perception, employee engagement under the impact of perception on self- efficacy and reward First, for testing hypothesis “H1: Employee training positively influence employee engagement.” the regression analysis would be applied for only
Training Self-efficacy Reward Engagement Training
** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed) two variables: training perception and employee engagement Result of the analysis is indicated in the table below:
Table 4.7: Regression analysis (Dependent variable: Employee Engagement)
According to the result, the p-value of the variables are less than 0.05, indicating that the relationship has statistically meaning with the data collected for this study In other words, it is able to say that there has a linear correlation between the predicting variable: training perception and the dependent variable: employee engagement The data analysis result has supported hypothesis H1, meaning that at 5% significant level, training perception positively influence employee engagement with the unstandardized coefficient value is 0.340 and standardized beta coefficient value is
H2: Employee’s self-efficacy positively mediates the relationship between employee training and employee engagement
This study, as mentioned in the above chapter, gives effort to investigate the mediating effect of self-efficacy to the relationship between training perception and employee engagement using Baron and Kenny (1986) and method for analyzing mediation process Self-efficacy here is called mediating variable or mediator
According to those authors, a mediation process may occur under some conditions:
(a) The independent variable significantly affects the mediator
(b) The independent variable directly significantly affects the dependent variable when not under the control of the mediator
(c) The mediator has a significant influence on the dependent variable
(d) The effect of the independent variable on the dependent variable reduce when their relationship is under the control of the mediator
When mediation happens, if the effect of the independent variable is totally eliminated under the control of the mediator, then it is called perfect mediation; otherwise, it is call partial mediation
In this study, the author uses Process v3, a macro tool developed by Hayes (2017) for SPSS application in order to analyze the mediating effect of self-efficacy on the relationship between training perception and employee engagement The result of analysis is as below:
Table 4.8: Mediation analysis (Dependent variable: Employee engagement; Mediator: Self-efficacy)
Model (standardized coefficient of TR is 347) coeff s.e t p LLIC ULIC
Model (Standardized coefficients of TR is 233, SELF is.497) coeff s.e t p LLIC ULIC
According to the result (1), when testing the effect of training perception on self- efficacy, p-value is lower than 0.005, meaning that there has a statistically meaningful relationship between those two variables with 95% confidence interval, and with positive coefficient value, thus responses to condition (a) The condition (b) is consistent with the first regression analysis result in testing H1, that training perception has positive impact on employee engagement
Result (2) expresses the effects of both independent and mediating variables on the independent variable Accordingly, the p-value for all variables are lower than 0.05, and the coefficient for self-efficacy is 0.434 – a significant number, proves that when engagement with 95% confidence interval, and the impact from the mediator is considerable, thus responses to condition (c) Besides, the coefficient for training perception under the control of the mediator decrease from 0.340 to 0.195, indicating that its effect on the independent variable has reduced, associated with condition (d)
From the analysis above, it can be statistically concluded that self-efficacy positively partially mediates the relationship between training perception and employee engagement Hence, the hypothesis H2 is supported
H3: Reward moderates the impact of training perception on employee engagement, that this impact will be stronger when employees’ perception of reward becomes more positive
Figure 4.1 Statistical moderating model (Source: Baron and Kenny, 1986)
This study tried to explore the moderating effect of reward on the relationship between training perception and employee engagement while self-efficacy playing the role of a mediator This means the model become moderated mediation model
Generally, a moderator may be qualitative or quantitative variable that influence the
Moderator Outcome variable c a b direction and/or strength of the relationship between predictor and outcome variable (Baron and Kenny, 1986) The interaction of moderator occurs when the moderator significantly affects the outcome variable, and the product of the moderator and predictor (as interaction variable) also significantly affects the outcome variable (See Figure 4.1)
In this study, the author intended to test the effect of reward in general, regardless it is contained of two components as definition The purpose of this intention is to see the synthetic impact of the perception of reward on the focusing relationship, not the separate intrinsic or extrinsic reward in particular Thus, the author has combine the two dimensions of the moderating variable into one, by using super scale, which calculate the mean of each component, and then calculate the average value of those two means The moderated mediation was analyzed using Process v3 The result is shown as below:
Model (Int: TR × RE) coeff s.e t p LLIC ULIC
According to the result, in model (3) the p-values for all variables except the interaction variable (TR x RE) are lower than 0.05, meaning in the tested moderation model, it is failed to stated that the interaction variable has the linear relationship with employee engagement Based on the nature of moderator, it is not able to conclude that reward has moderating effect on the link between training perception and employee engagement With the collected data, the result of analysis did not support the hypothesis H3.
DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATION
Research findings
After analyzing collected data, the result was provided in the previous chapter, indicate the support for 2 in total of 3 hypotheses Summary of the result is shown as below:
Table 5.1: Summary of the results of hypotheses testing
Employee training positively influence employee engagement Supported
Employee’s self-efficacy positively mediates the relationship between employee training and employee engagement
Reward moderates the impact of training perception on employee engagement, that this impact will be stronger when employees’ perception of reward becomes more positive
Conclusion 1: Training has positive significant impact on employee engagement
In the study of Ezam (2018) mentioned in chapter 2, the result indicated that training has no significant impact on employee engagement According to Ezam, the respondents of the questionnaires contained middle-level managers, who found that training – which considerably referred to technical skills or job-related abilities – was not so worthy rather than they need development chances in the personality or career in order to get engaged to the work In this study, the sample consists of a large number of employees who are not in managerial position, which account for 75% of respondents People in this level may find that job-related training is necessary for them for enhancing their ability and skills for doing job well Additionally, almost respondents are in young age, who may still need to learn more the skills and knowledge which can be applicable for their job, in order to be more professional and efficient in working, as well as to improve their performance Thus, they find training sessions provided by companies is significantly important for them, and it can engage them to the work essentially Those reasons may explain why this study given out that training vitally positively effect employee engagement – which is an opposite result to Ezam’s work Another reason may come from the nature of the industry In the banking industry, people usually work and follow a formal process with several regulations and rules Meanwhile, employees in the creative industry often work flexibly and freely as long as they can generate and give out new innovative ideas
Although this helps them for facilitating their creativity, people may be driven to distraction Furthermore, such flexibility and freedom might affect negatively the shared goals and values among employees Those potential consequences shall influence considerably to their intellectual engagement and social engagement
Training activity may help people to avoid such consequences Not only helping them to get knowledge and improve skills and abilities, it will also draw their attention and concentration to their tasks or work, as well as the common values among employees and organization Thus, if employees perceive positively about the training received, their level of engagement should raise
The first result of the study is associated with some literature from the past, which concluded that there was a strong relationship between training, under different forms, and employee engagement (Salanova, 2005; Suan, 2014; Ahmed, 2015) In addition, training perception of employees also predicted many factors which were contained in or related to employee engagement, such as organizational citizenship behavior (Skarlicki, 1997), commitment (Sahinidis, 2008), post-training organizational commitment (Schmidt, 2007), and behavior (Demerouti et al., 2010) According to Fletcher (2015), employee engagement also played as a role of mediator between training perception and some other factors, indicating that the direct relationship from training to engagement was confirmed
This result indicates the essential role of training activity in the workplace in Vietnamese context Employees need training to increase their knowledge and skills, as well as intensive understanding about the tasks and work in their organization On the reversed way, organizations need to provide training activity for educating their employees to be more effective and efficient in work and to be able to develop in the purpose of adapting new responsibilities, new challenges or new positions Besides, employee satisfaction and perception on training activity they received is also significant to employers, since it is an important factor which directly considerably affects the behavior, attitude and emotion of employee, which are considered as employee engagement Since level of employee engagement lead to several results that influence organizational performance and outcomes, it is highly recommended that organizations should pay a vital attention on the antecedents of engagement, and training is not the exception
Conclusion 2: Self-efficacy play a role as a mediator in the relationship between training and employee engagement
In this study, the result illustrates that self-efficacy significantly mediates the link between training perception and employee engagement for people who work in creative industry in Vietnam Even though there are few papers who studied exactly the same mediation model, the result is associated with the previous works by several researchers First, self-efficacy was concluded that may be caused by different forms and results of employee training (Bandura, 1986, 1997; Carter et al., 2016) Then, self-efficacy was considered as predictor of employee engagement (Xanthopoulou, 2007; Wen et al., 2017), optimistic behavior and emotion, which facilitate the employee engagement (Llorens, Schaufeli, et al., 2007; Salanova, Llorens, et al., 2011; Vera et al., 2012); behaviors and activities (Lorente, 2009) In this study, the sample includes people in young generations, who may learn and understand knowledge, skills more easily and effectively The satisfaction about organizational support, the amount, the applicability which fit their needs might help them feel that they are getting better gradually, thus not just improve their actual ability but also their confidence about such ability in doing work That may be the reason which explain the role of self-efficacy as a mediator between training perception and employee engagement
Based on this finding, it can be seen that employee self-efficacy, as one of personal resources, place a great importance to the HR activities in an organization Due to its mediating effect, there would be a challenge for organization in general and HR department in particular that how to raise not just the employee satisfaction of training, but also the level of self-efficacy among them, in order to gather higher engagement
Conclusion 3: With collected data, reward is not able to be concluded that it has moderating effect on the relationship between training perception and employee engagement
From the regression analysis for testing moderating effect of reward, the result indicates that reward has considerable direct positive impact on employee engagement This is associated with numerous previous studies, which resulted in the conclusion that reward, in different kinds, can help elevate the level of employee engagement (Guest, 2003; Thompson, 2000; Saks, 2006) As the hypothesis 3, it was assumed that if employees’ perception of reward become more positive, training will influence employee engagement more strongly or more significantly, and vice versa
However, its interaction to such relation has no linear correlation with the dependent variable It means that within the research sample, the interference of reward is not able to vary the strength of the impact of employee training perception on employee engagement In other words, perception on reward may not able to strengthen or weaken the relationship between training perception and engagement as assumption
Thus, it is failed to support the hypothesis that reward plays as a moderator in this model, based on linear regression analysis This result may be caused by the characteristics of research sample First, the sample size of this study is 152, which might be not enough for expressing more accurately the nature of moderating effect, which is indicated by analyzing the impact of the product of two different variables on another one Since the result of multiplying two variables might be varied significantly, it may need larger sample size to represent the population, as well as to have better statistical analysis Second, nearly 45% of the respondents is in the age of under 25, and the similar proportion for the age from 25 to 30, estimating a large proportion of young generation in the research sample The work of Vianen et al
(2011) also pointed out the similar thing, that younger employees has higher training and development willingness in comparison with older ones Additionally, Inceoglu et al (2012) found out that for employees who were in young generation is more highly motivated by career progression, including training activity People in this age often may not have much experience, but have quite high level of confidence and willingness to learn They might naturally want to work more to get experience and knowledge, thus engage more to the work This may explain the mediation model with the mediating effect of self-efficacy between training and engagement
Otherwise, this may explain why reward does not interact significantly in the involvement with the predictor – training, to the outcome variable – engagement
Accordingly, those employees may have less expectation on the reward they can receive, but focus more on improving their ability at the workplace Hence, their perceived satisfaction of the reward might not strong enough to vary the speed or strength of the impact between employees’ perception of training and employee engagement as predictor and outcome variable respectively, in the assumed moderation model.
Contribution and implication
For theoretical contribution, this paper has confirmed several previous results which directly or indirectly study the relationship between employee training perception and employee engagement, that there has significant positive impact of training on engagement On the other hand, it theoretically confirmed that the difference in managerial level and age may result in the change in such relationship, particularly it may cause the impact become insignificant Furthermore, this study has successfully proposed a suitable theoretical mediation framework, between 3 variables of training, self-efficacy and employee engagement, for the social and management research in terms of HRM and organizational behavior, based on reviewing of several related literature to identify the considerable factors, as well as collecting and analyzing the data to prove the relationships This framework not just indicates that self-efficacy partially positively mediates the link between training and employee engagement, but also has confirmed several previous works which estimated the essential effect of training on self-efficacy, and effect of self-efficacy on employee engagement separately Thus, researchers can use this framework for theoretically reviewing for future studies about related relationships or variables
For practical contribution, one significant finding of this paper is that the perception and satisfaction of employee on training can facilitate employee engagement, which lead to better business performance and outcomes The study has confirmed several previous literatures on both training and engagement terms, as well as researches provided by HRM organizations Besides, this study has found out the mediating effect of self-efficacy on such relationship, referred to important aspects of antecedents and consequences of this personal resource, which studied separately by different researchers The study has also gained some implications for practical business in creative industry in Vietnamese context
Firstly, training has been confirmed as a vital factor and become more and more essential within HRD practices particularly and organization generally Not only providing employee opportunities to gain more intensive knowledge and useful skills on work, training can positively predict higher level of engagement for employee
Applying for the creative industry, where the main labor force is in young generation, training increasingly strongly perform its role With the purpose of generating greater business outcomes and high performance, training should be paid more attention and be improved in both quality, preparation, and assessment Training should satisfy not only the needs of organization, but also the demand of employee about the useful content, suitable quantity, careful schedule and purposes, or professional development opportunity Additionally, training should be considered and held at any level within workplace, including teams, departments, and organizational level, under variety of forms, activities and methods
Furthermore, employer should focus on self-efficacy as a core competency for their employee particularly and HRM strategic development generally Although self- efficacy is one of personal resources, companies can research more about the sources of it and facilitate their employee to practices those activities, including training, for gather higher level of self-efficacy For example, training session should be designed to not just aim at improving some abilities related to specific tasks or works, but for enhancing the confidence of employee through different soft-skills and abilities learned by different approach Employee might be assigned more difficult but reachable task, and be provided the guidance and encouragement from experienced colleagues or supervisors They then may become more confident that they can do the task well, hence increase their self-efficacy In addition, recruiter should consider self-efficacy as one important for the potential candidates in order to fill any available positions in the organization Generally, company should design some approaches to test candidate’s self-efficacy, aiming at recruiting the candidates who has high confidence with their abilities, or having suitable training and development process for ones they recruit to enhance their level of self-efficacy.
Limitation and future research
This study has number of limitations that may suggest some further potentials for future research
Firstly, the sample size of the research was small, which might hardly represent the population in current research context Since time and resources were limited, the data was just collected from 152 respondents for analyzing, which may not so considerable for expressing characteristics of the population For future research, a larger sample is highly recommended for better representativeness and analysis
Second limitation is about personal bias of respondents The method of collecting data, which used survey questionnaires to collect the answers, means that it depends on the viewpoint of the respondents Besides, the variables of the study were considerably related to the psychological term, which can be evaluated strongly based on people’s subjectivity Hence these problems may lead to the individual biases For getting more accurate result, future research should investigate or design the assessing method which can be more objective For example, researchers can collect the data of evaluating the engagement from both employees and their supervisors or colleagues, thus it might result in an estimation from different perspectives Thirdly, although the industry which was focused to research in this paper is opened and contains different types of job – creative industry – it is still a unique work which require some special skills and abilities, as well as some specific characteristics from employees Therefore, the paper still has limitation in terms of generalizability Thus, researches which investigate different types of population and sample also is recommended for researchers in the future Furthermore, this study has just focused on reward as a general term, but has not broken down it as its components of extrinsic and intrinsic reward For future research, it is also suggested that each component of reward should be tested their effect separately, for a better and deeper analysis Last but not least, this study is cross-sectional and focus on one single industry, and due to this the result just reflects the situation at a specific time The perception of people may differ depends on the context and time period; thus, the result might be dissimilar
In future research, longitudinal study which concerns those changes for comparison is suggested, but obviously it will be costly in terms of time and other resources
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1 Do you have experience in working for organization in Vietnam?
2 Have you received any training activity during working period before December 2018?
4 What was your age when you receive such training activity?
5 What is your position when you receive such training activity?
6 What is your average income?
Please rank the following statements from 1 – totally disagree to 5 – totally agree
1 – totally disagree 2 – disagree 3 – neither disagree or agree
My department provides learning/training opportunities to meet the changing needs of the workplace
In my department, learning is planned and purposeful rather than accidental
In my department, people are interested in both personal and professional development
Training and development are encouraged and rewarded in my department
Overall, the on-the-job training I receive is applicable to my job
Overall, the training I receive on the job meets my needs
Overall, I am satisfied with the amount of training I receive on the job
I am generally able to use what I learn in on-the-job training in my job
I will be able to achieve most of the goals that I set for myself
When facing difficult tasks, I am certain that I will accomplish them
In general, I think that I can obtain outcomes that are important to me
I believe I can succeed at most any endeavor to which I set my mind
I will be able to successfully overcome many challenges
I am confident that I can perform effectively on many different tasks
Compared to other people, I can do most tasks very well
Even when things are tough, I can perform quite well
If I am supposed to put in extra effort in my job, I need to get extra pay
It is important for me to have an external incentive to strive for in order to do a good job
External incentives such as bonuses and provisions are essential for how well I perform my job
If I had been offered better pay, I would have done a better job
The tasks that I do at work are themselves representing a driving power in my job
The tasks I do at work are enjoyable 1 2 3 4 5
My job is very exciting 1 2 3 4 5
My job is so interesting that it is a motivation in itself
Sometimes I become so inspired by my job that I almost forget everything else around me