Industrial and Organizational Psychology

Training Employees

Copyright Paul E. Spector, All rights reserved, March 15, 2005

Training In Organizations
• Organizations spend $billions on training their employees
•  Training can be very valuable by
– Increasing employee competence and performance
– Increasing employee motivation
– Increasing employee adjustment and well-being
•  Not always effective because training
– is for the wrong thing
– given to the wrong people
– uses the wrong methods
•  Characteristics of organizational training
– 1. Field dominated by nonpsychologists practitioners.
– 2. Much training crisis motivated.
– 3. Much training frivolous‑‑no particular goal.
– 4. Many fads & fashions.
– 5. Nontheoretical. Few principles are applied.
Main I/O Training Activities

• Need assessment
 
• Design
 
• Evaluation
 
• Delivery of training usually (but not always) done by non-
psychologist trainers
Psychological aspects in Needs
Assessment
focus on three aspects:
1. Organizational level: what training is
required to achieve org goal?
2. Job level
3. person level
Brainstorming

• A footwear firm sets one of it's goals in

2017: to ensure maximum quality control
of the products. The head of production
dept. plans to minimize manufacturing
defects from 15% to 5% in next 12
months.

• Can you apply three levels of needs

assessment in this context?
 Needs Assessment
• Determining what training should be done
 
• Major methods
– Job analysis: KSAO's necessary for the job
– Critical incidents: E.g., hospital incident reports
– Performance appraisal: Can be part of a performance
management system (see chapter 4)
– Employee surveys
Training Program Design Principles
• Goal: Transfer of training to job
• Principles
– Feedback‑necessary for learning
– General principles: Cover the basic principles involved in the
training.
– Identical elements: Between training and job situation
– Overlearning--practice
– Ability
– Motivation
– Supportive environment increases motivation
– Anxiety: Yerkes‑Dodson
Model of Transfer of Training (Baldwin
& Ford)
Trainee characteristics

1. What strategy to apply if you find

particular trainees having low-ability?

2. How to motivate employees

(specifically those who are kind of
demotivated) to do their best in a training
session?
Critical thinking

• what particular feature of training design

that is mostly ignored by T& D manager/
training designer?
 Evaluation: Did the Training Work?
• Criteria: Ultimate vs. actual
• Training criteria
– Reactions
– Learning
•  Performance criteria
– Behavior
– Results
• Design of evaluation studies
– Posttest only
– Pretest‑posttest
– Control group
Psychological aspects in Training
Evaluation
• Krikpatrick's Training Evaluation Framework

• Reaction
• Learning
• Behavior
• Result
Krikpatrick's training evaluation model
Brainstorming

• What could be the possible reasons if no

behavior changes at level 3?

• Which particular level/ levels generally

managers avoid or tend to avoid? Why?