The importance of human resources is growing more than ever as a main power source for company growth in these business environments. Human resources development works as a leverage tool for such growth. Learning transfer has been studied for long in ...
The importance of human resources is growing more than ever as a main power source for company growth in these business environments. Human resources development works as a leverage tool for such growth. Learning transfer has been studied for long in the aspect of the effectiveness and the efficiency of HRD investment. But research’s to enlighten the relationship between learning transfer and personal/organizational performance are not sufficient so far in Korea.
This research analyzed the relationship between learning transfer and learner’s competency enhancement as an individual level of performance, including the influencing factors on learning transfer. The purpose of this study is to make a contribution to secure the efficiency of investment on trainings and developments by finding predictable variables needed for domestic businesses to undertake training and development in a performance-oriented way. This research also tried to overcome same- source and same-measurement-context(SS/SMC) effects by obtaining data from learner and learner’s manager and by obtaining data from three different times.
The research methodology was to gather data from learners and learners’ managers of a domestic manufacture company ‘A’ by using a questionnaire. The Questionnaire was distributed three times - pre-training, during-training and post-trining. The training programs in question were six business skill programs for employees. Program titles are Planning, Problem-solving, Communication, Persuasion, Human networking, Business pretentions. These programs were developed to improve their business job competency. A total of 279 and 226 questionnaires of learners and learner’s managers respectively were included to the final analysis.
The results of research are as follows. Firstly, learning transfer has positive impacts on learner’s competency enhancement. This impact is found in any analysis, using learner’s data only or using learner’s manager’s data of learning transfer. Secondly, the influencing factors on learning transfer differ according to the data source of learning transfer. When analyzed with learner’s transfer data, influencing factors like perceived content validity, transfer design and peer support have significant positive effects on learning transfer. But none of influencing factors has significant effects on learning transfer when analyzed with the learner’s manger’s transfer data.
The research has its limitations when it comes to using a questionnaire of the limited types of industries and companies involved and the restrictions on measurable variables. Thus, it leads to the following suggestions for a follow-up study based on the research results.
Firstly, this research targeted a specific program for employees of a specific corporation. Therefore, the research hypothesis can be generalized after conducting other researches with different programs, types of training and trainees and comparing the results. Secondly, further research is required to study the impacts of learning transfer by the influencing factrs using learner’s peers who can directly observe learner’s transfer activities. Thirdly, further research is needed to measure different index for individual level of performance like job satisfaction, intention of job retirement and individual financial performance. Fourthly, this research used question items from Holton’s Learning Transfer System Inventory and found the high correlations among factors. So, further study needs to clarify the individuality and validity among factors of Holton’s LTSI.