THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMPLOYEE TRAINING ANDEMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT IMPACTS OFREWARD AND SELF EFFICACY

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITYVIETNAM JAPAN UNIVERSITY YOKOHAMA NATIONAL UNIVERSTY Master’s Program in Business Administration MASTER THESIS PROPOSAL THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMPLOYEE TRAIN

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

VIETNAM JAPAN UNIVERSITY YOKOHAMA NATIONAL UNIVERSTY

Master’s Program in Business Administration

MASTER THESIS PROPOSAL

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMPLOYEE TRAINING AND

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT: IMPACTS OF

REWARD AND SELF-EFFICACY

Supervisor(s):

Prof Kodo Yokozawa

Dr Tran Huy Phuong

Student’s name: Hoang Vu Duong Student’s ID : 17110016

Yokohama, December 19 th , 2018.

Table of Contents

I INTRODUCTION 3

1 Research motivation 3

2 Research objectives 4

II LITERATURE REVIEW 4

1 Employee Training 4

2 Employee engagement 5

3 Self-efficacy 7

4 Reward 8

III RESEARCH QUESTIONS 9

IV RESEARCH MODEL AND HYPOTHESIS 10

1 Research model 10

2 Hypotheses 10

V RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 10

1 Respondent 10

2 Data collection 11

3 Measurement (tentative): 11

VI EXPECTED RESULTS 12

REFERENCES 13

I INTRODUCTION

1 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 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 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 business 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

2 Research objectives

Basically, the objective of this research is to explore the relationship between employee training and employee engagement under impacts of different factors, in order to propose ways to improve the level of engagement for organizations

II LITERATURE REVIEW

1 Employee Training

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 Martha Embrey et al., (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.” This paper will be conducted base on Martha’s definition

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 somehow 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

2 Employee engagement

There are several definitions of engagement have been developed This paper will use definition of employee engagement introduced by Soane et al., which proposed that engagement has three underlying facets: intellectual engagement; affective engagement and social engagement, and define them as

‘the extent to which one is intellectually absorbed in work’; ‘the extent to which one experiences a state of positive affect relating to one’s work role’ and ‘the extent to which one is socially connected with the working environment and shares common values with colleagues’ respectively

Empirical studies on engagement also have been conducted with several findings Harter (2002) generalized relationship were found between unit-level employee satisfaction-engagement and the 5 organizational outcomes: profitability, productivity, customer satisfaction, employee safety, turnover Self-efficacy, organizational-based self-esteem, and optimism mediate the relationship between job resources and work engagement and exhaustion, and influence the perception of job resources (Xanthopoulou, 2007) (Shuck et al., 2014) explored the mediating effect of employee engagement on the relationship between perceived support for participation in HRD practices and intention to turnover and found that employee engagement and its components, such as cognitive, emotional, behavioral engagement, have partial mediating effects 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)

3 Employee training and employee engagement

Recently, the relationship between employee training and employee engagement is explored, however the results are not consistent Suan et al (2014) study in the Malaysian hotel sector found that work engagement can be enhanced through improving on the service trainings provided 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, reverse finding for training has been showed in research of Ahmad et al (2018), which stated that there is no significant impact of training on employee engagement The inconsistency may be caused by different contexts of sample, or different in working fields to be more specific Together with several 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 Another possible reason of this inconsistency

is that the relationship between employee training and employee engagement may be affected by some other 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

4 Self-efficacy

Definition of efficacy is given by Bandura (1997), 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 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

Several studies have found a significant and consistent relationship between self-efficacy and employee performance 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) 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 successful out-comes, which increases the individual’s ability to sustain effort when pursuing goals (Carter

et al., 2016) The study by Frayne and Geringer (2000) empirically examined the role of efficacy in mediating the relationship between

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 Notwithstanding, in 2007, Xanthopoulou indicated that self-efficacy, as one of three personal resources, had mediating effect on work engagement Due to those conflicted results, self-efficacy has been chosen as mediator to explore its effect on the focused relationship

5 Reward

According to Bratton & Gold (2003); Haider, Aamir, Hamid & Hashim (2015), reward have been defined as the “financial, non-financial and psychological benefits” that companies provides to employees in return from their contributions and efforts to work In 1972, Deci classified reward as

“rewards can be categorized into two broad areas namely extrinsic rewards and intrinsic rewards”, relating to financial (pay, bonuses, tips… and monetary-related terms such as promotion) and non-financial (praises, appreciation or social recognition…) respectively

Reward 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 relationship between rewards, trust and engagement in South African

workplace, reward is tested that can be able to predict trust and engagement (Janine et al., 2016) 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’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 Thus, reward has been selected to be a moderator for not just testing its impacts on the link between self-efficacy and employee engagement, but also for discovering the differences in effects between types of reward

III RESEARCH QUESTIONS

From Introduction and Literature Review parts with the motivation mentioned, this study is conducted aiming at answering below research questions

 Does self-efficacy have mediating effect on the influence of employee training to employee engagement?

 Does reward have moderating effect on the relationship of this perception and employee engagement?

 Does level of engagement varied when being affected by moderating effect of different types of reward?

IV RESEARCH MODEL AND HYPOTHESIS

1 Research model

Research model:

2 Hypotheses

 H1: Employee training positively influence employee’s self-efficacy

 H2: There is a positive relationship between self-efficacy and employee engagement

 H3: There is a positive moderating effect of reward on the relationship between self-efficacy and employee engagement

 H4: The level of moderating effect is different between intrinsic and extrinsic reward

V RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

1 Respondent

The respondents will be choose using random sampling method in the population of employees who received training and development activities before October of 2018 (in Vietnam), from various companies, regardless the working field

2 Data collection

Questionnaires will be distributed via several means in order to gather data It will contain items to collect demographic data, and items to measure 4 variables included in this study

3 Measurement (tentative):

Employee training: to be decided

Reward

- Extrinsic

- Intrinsic

Employee Engagement Self-efficacy

Employee

Training