The relationship between training perception and employee engagement impacts of perception of reward and self efficacy

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITYVIETNAM JAPAN UNIVERSITY HOANG VU DUONG THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRAINING PERCEPTION AND EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT: IMPACTS OF PERCEPTION OF REWARD AND SELF-EFFICACY

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

VIETNAM JAPAN UNIVERSITY

HOANG VU DUONG

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRAINING PERCEPTION AND EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT: IMPACTS OF PERCEPTION OF REWARD AND SELF-EFFICACY

MASTER THESIS BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

VIETNAM JAPAN UNIVERSITY

HOANG VU DUONG

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRAINING PERCEPTION AND EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT: IMPACTS OF PERCEPTION OF REWARD AND SELF-EFFICACY

MAJOR: BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

CODE: 60340102

RESEARCH SUPERVISORS

DR TRAN HUY PHUONG ASSOC PROF KODO YOKOZAWA

First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr Tran Huy Phuongand Assoc Prof Kodo Yokozawa, who are my supervisors, for their guidance,encouragement and useful comments on my master thesis These considerably help

me in completing this research work

I also would like to say thank to Vietnam Japan University and all lecturers here,especially in program of MBA, for giving me opportunity to study and experience

in international and academic environment, which provides me valuable knowledgeboth theoretically and practically

Furthermore, I want to thank all staffs of VJU, especially Ms Huong of from MBAprogram, for greatly supporting me during 2 years studying

Last but not least, I want to express my gratitude to all of my friends, especially Ms.Nguyen Huyen Trang and Ms Nguyen Thi Ngoc Anh for their help andencouragement, which academically and mentally support me at any difficult time.Sincerely,

Hoang Vu Duong

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES

LIST OF TABLES

LIST OF ABBREVIATION

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Research motivation 1

1.2 Research objectives 2

1.3 Research scope and objects 3

1.4 The structure of the paper 3

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 4

2.1 Employee engagement 4

2.2 Employee training 10

2.3 Self-efficacy 17

2.4 Reward 21

2.5 Research questions 25

CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 26

3.1 Research design 26

3.2 Conceptual research model 27

Variables and measuring instruments 27

Training perception 27

Self-efficacy 28 Reward 28

Employee engagement 29

Conceptual research model 30

3.3 Population, sample and data collection 31

Questionnaire design and administration 31

Population 32

Sample and data collection process 32

3.4 Sample demographics 33

CHAPTER 4: DATA ANALYSIS 34

4.1 Data preparation 34

4.2 Descriptive statistics 34

4.3 Reliability and validity 36

4.3.1 Reliability 36

4.3.2 Validity 37

4.4 Pearson correlation 39

4.5 Regression analysis and hypotheses testing 39

CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATION 46

5.1 Research findings 46

5.2 Contribution and implication 50

5.3 Limitation and future research 52

REFERENCES 54

APPENDIX 70

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1 Summary of antecedents and consequences of employee engagement 10

Figure 2.2 Training components and employee engagement model 15

Figure 2.3 Sources of Self-efficacy 19

Figure 2.4 Engagement Diagnostic Tool: National Health Service 22

Figure 2.5 Total reward system 23

Figure 3.1 Conceptual research model 30

Figure 4.1 Statistical moderating model 43

LIST OF TABLES

Table 3.1: Frequency of demographic information of respondents 33

Table 4.1: Coding of variables 34

Table 4.2: Descriptive statistics of all variables 35

Table 4.3: Overall Cronbach’s alpha for each variable and sub-variable 36

Table 4.4: Item-total statistics for Intrinsic reward variable 37

Table 4.5: Rotated component matrix 38

Table 4.6: Pearson correlation matrix 39

Table 4.7: Regression analysis (Dependent variable: Employee Engagement) 40

Table 4.8: Mediation analysis (Dependent variable: Employee engagement; Mediator: Self-efficacy) 42

Table 4.9: Moderation analysis 44

Table 5.1: Summary of the results of hypotheses testing 46

LIST OF ABBREVIATION

JTJSS Job Training and Job Satisfaction Survey

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1 Research motivation

Employee engagement is increasingly becoming a vital concept which has beenbelieved that it directly results in higher employee performance and organizationalperformance Mike Johnson (2004) wrote in his book named “The New Rules ofEngagement” that “the ability to engage employees, to make them work with ourbusiness, is going to be one of the greatest organizational battles of the coming 10years.”, which was a crucial prediction about the importance of employee engagementfor the future of industries After that, several academic papers and practical reportshave stressed employee engagement as an essential factor which may drive businessoutcomes In an article named as “Why Employee Engagement?” (2012) on Forbes byKruse, there are 28 academic studies had been reviewed that they show the correlationsbetween 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 hasbeen an important concern in the corporate world.” According to that paper,organizations cannot get and sustain their loyal customers by products and processonly, but also need “highly-motivated, dedicated and involved employees”, oremployees who has high engagement, in other word Thus, employee engagement inrecent time has been widely and deeply investigated in by organizations andresearchers, in order to get better understanding about it, hence can utilize it for betteroutcomes 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 forcompanies to improve employee performance through types of training activities It is akey factor in organizational management It is seemed that training is one of the

ways for organizations to enhance level of engagement of employees Annualreports on employee satisfaction and engagement by Society of Human ResourcesManagement showed many conditions for employee engagement, including trainingand development However, training and development took account for almost thelowest position in the recent years (SHRM, 2015, 2016, 2017), despite the fact thatseveral studies mentioned significant impacts of training on engagement.

These indications suggest the need to have a deeper look at such relationship andbecome the significant motivations for conducting this study

1.2 Research objectives

Basically, the objective of this research is to explore the link between employeetraining and employee engagement in current Vietnamese context According to areport about Employee Engagement & Retention in Vietnam (Towers Watson,2010), in the period of 4 years from 2007 to 2010, the percentage of employeeengagement 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 aremanagement systems, employee perceptions on company image, effectiveperformance evaluation, empowerment and sophistication However, BrandsVietnam – an electronic portal with high reputation in Vietnam, showed that thisindication has declined considerably by about 10%, stayed at 70% in 2017, and evenlower in 2015 and 2016 Although it still accounted for a good level in comparisonwith the level of the world and Asia, this decrease has been a warning fororganizations in Vietnam Together with the number which is indicated by Gallupmentioned above, it is suggested that the employee engagement should beimproved, and there have been several opportunities for enhancing the business aswell as talent management for companies in Vietnam

Thus, based on the practical situation and previous academic studies, this paper aims toexplain and explore the relationship of the two important Human ResourcesManagement (HRM) aspects: employee training and employee engagement, in order

to propose suggestions to improve the level of engagement for organizations inVietnam, hence enrich the outcomes and performance for those companies.

1.3 Research scope and objects

Basically, the scope of the study will be employees who have working experience for acompany in Vietnam and received training activities while working Besides, since theemployee engagement is a psychological and behavioral term, it is understandable thatother variables should be psychologically and behaviorally studied, from the view point

of employee Particularly, this research has investigated in the perception andsatisfaction of employees on the organizational training activities they received, theirself-efficacy and perception on reward received from organization, in order to see therelationship between those factors on their perceived employee engagement It will bediscussed further on the next Chapter

1.4 The structure of the paper

The paper starts with a chapter which provide an introduction for the study Afterthat, it continues with 4 chapters of reviewing literature, method for study, datacollection and analysis, and findings and conclusions Particularly:

Chapter 1 discusses about the introduction with research motivation, researchobjectives, scope and objects

Chapter 2 reviews and summarizes the previous papers which related to thevariables in this study, as well as proposes research questions and hypotheses

Chapter 3 provides information about the approach method, research model andmethod 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, thischapter also states the limitation and suggestions for future studies

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter deals with theoretical parts of the key concepts in this study, andreviews of the papers which researched about related issues

The definition of employee engagement, for nearly 3 decades of researching anddeveloping, is still raising a controversy among researchers and organizations Inother 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 organizationmembers’ selves to their work roles; in engagement, people employ and expressthemselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances”.According to Kahn, people with engagement are enabled to concomitantly expresstheir preferred selves and completely satisfy their role requirements Kahn suggeststhree direct psychological conditions of meaningfulness, psychological safety andpsychological availability as influencing employees’ engagement (May et al., 2004;Rich et al., 2010)

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 desirablecondition, has an organizational purpose, and connotes involvement, commitment,passion, enthusiasm, focused e ort and energy, so it has both attitudinal andffort and energy, so it has both attitudinal andbehavioral components” It is easy to see that almost the developed definitions foremployee engagement are related to individual psychology or behavior In fact,social aspect of engagement, which referred to the experience of connectedness withother people who could be colleagues but may be anyone that the work roleprovides an interface with (Kahn, 1990), was presented and acknowledged inscholars (Shuck and Wollard, 2010) (Soane et al., 2012) For example, Saks claimedthat relationships with supervisors can be antecedents of engagement (Saks, 2006;cited by Soane et al., 2012) Notwithstanding, “yet social engagement had not beenconceptualized 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 positiveaffect 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 withcolleagues (Soane et al., 2012)

This paper, with the opinion of author that engagement requires both individual andsocial psychological, values and behavioral statements, will follow the definition ofSoane 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

Personal engagement

Studies on engagement also have been conducted with several findings In 1990,Kahn, with the purpose of exploring the conditions at work by which peoplepersonally engage and disengage, had identified three psychological conditions -meaningfulness, safety, and availability, which help explaining the variance inpeople'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 engagementaround the psychological aspects of human beings In 1992, Kahn proposed anexpansion in theoretical issue of his work Such expansion delineates the concept ofpsychological presence, its dimensions (attentiveness, connectedness, integration, andfocus), and their impact on personal engagement (Michelle R Simpson, 2009) At thattime, Kahn theorizes some factors that preceding the psychological conditions ofmeaningfulness, safety, and availability, consists of various work elements, socialsystems, and individual distractions Beside that conceptualization, his findingssuggested that outcomes of personal engagement may include performance quality andproductivity It means, when an individual finds his job meaningful, feels safe, and hasthe essential resources in their work role both externally and internally, personalengagement 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 threepsychological conditions, as well as put in various determinants of personalengagement such as job enrichment, relations, self-consciousness, activities orresources (May et al., 2004; Michelle R Simpson, 2009)

Burnout/Engagement

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 ofburnout/engagement affect the perception of employee about the change withinorganization, found that there were a mediating effect of burnout/engagement thatlinked 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 andFinegan proposed three models suggest empowerment has indirect effects onburnout/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 partiallymediating effect on the relationship between work life and adverse events

Whereby, a working environment which enabled higher support for professionalpractice, would lead to greater engagement (Leiter and Laschinger, 2006).

et al., 2002, 2003, 2004) Moreover, since the measurement tool UWES weredeveloped, “a growing body of research focusing on this construct has evolved”(Michelle R Simpson, 2009) Simpson in his research stated that a number of studiesemphasized at the antecedents and/or consequences of work engagement, in which, theorganizational factors were illustrated that having a vital influence in predicting workengagement, but not individual factors One of the illustrations is the result of severalstudies, 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 whohave higher level of control, reward, values, or better work life experience would bemore engaged to work (Koyuncu, 2006)

Additionally, previous empirical studies also indicated that the turnover intention,organizational commitment, service climate and customer loyalty were the potentialconsequences of work engagement (Schaufeli and Bakker, 2004; Hakenen et al., 2006;Richardsen et al., 2006; Salanova et al., 2005) Besides, the demonstration of themediating effect of work engagement for the relationship between job resources (careeropportunities, supervisor coaching, role-clarity, and autonomy) and the organizationaloutcomes were found in several studies (Michelle R Simpson, 2009)

Employee engagement

When it comes to employee engagement, with the own developed definition, Harterhad investigated engagement that way and generalized relationship were foundbetween unit-level employee satisfaction-engagement and the 5 organizationaloutcomes: profitability, productivity, customer satisfaction, employee safety,turnover Self-efficacy, organizational-based self-esteem, and optimism mediate therelationship between job resources and work engagement and exhaustion, andinfluence the perception of job resources (Xanthopoulou, 2007)

More recently, in a study which aimed at testing the influence of employee engagement

to the discretionary effort and turnover intention, the result showed that three conditionsdeveloped by Kahn in 1990 and 1992 which are meaningfulness, safety and availabilityengagement, have no significant impact on discretionary effort, but two of them(meaningfulness and availability) negatively affect to employee turnover intention, inthe constraints of controlled job fit, affective commitment and psychological climate(Shuck et al., 2011) 3 year later, a research using UWES-9 – a transformation ofUWES as measurement for employee work engagement, stated that learningopportunity, coworker support, and supervisor support have a positive effect on workengagement (Sarti, 2014) However, there were no indication with the same result forother aspects of job resources, such as financial reward or performance feedback, whichhad been tested together with above 3 variables in his paper Besides, leadership wereone of the organizational conditions which had been exploited in the relationship withengagement Different styles of leadership brought different effects on employeeengagement While servant leadership had slight effect on employee engagement,transformational leadership style created a more essential impact Otherwise,transactional leadership were suggested that should be transformed, in order to gather asuitable environment which can facilitate higher level of engagement behavior (Shuckand Herd, 2012; De Clercq et al., 2014) (Shuck et al., 2014) explored the mediatingeffect of employee engagement on the relationship between perceived support forparticipation 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.

Empirically, Saks in 2006 proposed a model of antecedents and consequences ofemployee engagement In that model, employee engagement was categorized into 2aspects: job engagement and organizational engagement According to Saks,antecedents of engagement include job characteristics, perceived organizationalsupport, perceived supervisor support, rewards and recognition, procedural justice,distributive justice; and its consequences consist of job satisfaction, organizationalcommitment, intention to quit, and OCB However, the results of his study showedthe effects will depends on which variables of antecedents and consequences, andwhich types of engagement among 2 types above It means that there will be asignificant meaning by categorizing employee engagement

Figure 2.1 shows the antecedents and consequences of employee engagement whichwere synthesized from selected previous related studies Accordingly, job resourcesincluding learning chance, coworker support, and supervisor support, perceived supportfor participation in HRD practices, servant and transformational leadership, trainingperception, colleague’s incivility and work meanings were determined as theantecedents of engagement (Lee et al., 2017) In which, transformational leadership hadthe highest frequency of appearance in academic studies about the antecedents ofemployee engagement More generally, most of leadership styles have been researched

as preceding factors of engagement in conceptual studies, while servant leadership hasbeen found in the result of empirical papers Goal congruence and social interactionalso had been studied as engagement precursory but researchers found that there was nostrong impact of them on the research object Otherwise, consequences which are led to

by engagement consist of working behavior, turnover rate, knowledge creation, severalorganizational outcomes such as working performance and benefit, organizationalcitizenship behavior, in which employee performance improvement were emphasized,

as an ultimate purpose for studying and implementing employee engagement Thus, it

is suggested that engagement will

strongly positively drive working performance of employees in order to reach

greater organizational outcomes

Training perception EMPLOYEE Outcome variables (in-roleServant leadership ENGAGEMENT performance, turnover

Goal congruence Discretionary effort Social interaction Perceptions of HRD practices

Figure 2.1 Summary of antecedents and consequences of employee engagement

(Source: Lee et al., 2017)Hence, it can be said that which figure 1 show express not only the support for the

work of Saks, but also the contribution for the problem of antecedents and

consequences of employee engagement, through effort of several academic

researchers

2.2 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,

1985) Michel Armstrong in another definition, said that “Training is systematicdevelopment of the knowledge, skills and attitudes required by an individual toperform adequately a given task or job” (Armstrong, 2001) More recently, RossHolland (2012) has stated that training is “any planned activity to transfer or modifyknowledge, skills, and attitude through learning experiences Personnel may requiretraining for variety of reasons, including the need to maintain levels of competenceand respond to the demand of changing circumstances and new approaches andtechnologies” Training primarily linked to the improvement and upgradation of theskills and knowledge of the employees and focuses on employee behavior at large toimprove current and future state of job performance (Malik et al., 2013).

In this study, the perception of employee satisfaction on the training activity that theyparticipate in at the workplace will be considered as an independent variable and beinvestigated to find out its correlations with other variables Schmidt in his workcombined the two definitions of employee training (Landy, 1985; Patrick, 2000) andemployee 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 trainingperception For example, a favorable relationship between employee work training andtheir commitment with the company Accordingly, HRD should “adapt new researchmethods to demonstrate to organizational decision makers that training anddevelopment contributes to desired workplace attitudes… which may in turn influencebehaviors such as absenteeism and turnover” (Bartlett, 2001; cited by Schmidt, 2007)

In the study of training for new employees, Tannenbaum et al (1991) stated thatpositive or negative attitudes and impressions which employees may have will dependsstrongly on their job training at workplace Schmidt in his work also cited suggestionthat “a large part of the worker’s sense of job satisfaction can be attributed toworkplace learning opportunities” (Rowden and Conine, 2003) Finally, he found thatemployee satisfaction about job training highly correlated to overall job satisfactionwith the scope of employees was working in customer contact positions

Besides, he recommended that this correlation is proper among variety ofoccupational fields.

Employees minds and behavior within organizations are under a considerable impact oftheir perception on training (Mohammed, 2017) Beforehand, there was a notation thatmore positively employees perceive training activities in their workplace, more greatlythey 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 intraining 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 toattitudes and behaviors (Guest, 2002) The success of training activities will stronglydepend upon not just employee’s individual personality but also their perception aboutits benefits or outcomes (Burke and Hutchins, 2007) Additionally, employeeperception about training was suggested to be varied by different ways due to thedifferences in experience and thoughts about its purposes (Nishi, Lepak, and Schneider,2008) There has academical demonstration indicated that such perception hasconsiderable impacts on productivity, performance and level of engagement (Paul etal., 2003; Kuvass et al., 2009; Salanova, 2005)

Particularly, employee training is studied and referred as a vital part of HR practices forcreating improvement for work and organizational outcomes and employee behavior.There are several papers studied the impacts of training on the performance of theemployees A study in 2013 examined the influence of training on performance andpresented that “organizational performance is significantly determined by trainingimparted to the employees” Accordingly, training is an important antecedent ofperformance (Zahid, 2013) In the same year, Nassazi conducted a study about theimpact 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 positiveattitudes had been found towards the influence of training to the employees workingperformance, despite some constraints which control some of the effects of

the training activities (Mohammed Al-Mzary et al., 2015) The similar effect wasalso indicated by works of several other researchers, that training significantlypositively 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 oftraining program and employee satisfaction and working attitude His work foundout that “training had a great impact on the job satisfaction and retention of theemployees” and “is essential in keeping employees apt in their work so that they cangain satisfaction from it.” (Chepkosgey et al., 2015) Training has stronglypositively influenced to employee job satisfaction (Taormina, 1999; Garcia, 2005).This statement also was supported by work of Okechukwu, which proved thehypothesis that the relationship between training and employee satisfaction wasclearly illustrated (Okechukwu, 2017) Additionally, paper of Truitt indicated asignificant support for the hypothesis that “adequate job training is related topositive attitudes about job proficiency and that having adequate job training isrelated to positive attitudes about job training” Training and its positive effects onemployee 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 resourcesmanagement practices, and its connection with level of engagement of employees, fewstudies have been found which studied direct influences of individual HR functions, tosuch important concept (Suan, 2014; Salanova, 2005; cited by Ahmed, 2015).According to Ahmed et al (2015), employee training is empirically found prominent ininfluencing 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 theirbehaviors, emotions to enhance their skills and competencies It is related toengagement Simultaneously, employee training has

also been empirically tested with employee engagement, but mainly just as part ofHRM practices and not so direct (Ahmed et al., 2015) Salanova (2005) has foundthat organizational resources, including training factor, had strong impacts onemployee engagement In another research, Luthan (2010) found that trainingintervention significantly increased both the level of performance and psychologicalcapital, which consists of engagement behavior.

Employee training and employee engagement

There are few previous studies empirically investigated directly in the relationshipbetween employee training and employee engagement In the research which exploringengagement behavior among more than hundred employees in a Malaysian hotel, theresult has shown a strong influence to the engagement level resulted from trainingactivities (Salanova et al., 2006) With the same concept, it is suggested that workengagement 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 bothpersonal role engagement and work engagement on the relationship between trainingperceptions and work role behaviors, and compare the degrees of two engagements Hisfinding showed that personal role engagement has a stronger effect on the relationshipbetween training perceptions and task proficiency as well as training perceptions andtask adaptability However, there is no difference between the mediating effects of thetwo engagements on the relationship between training perceptions and task proactivity(Fletcher, 2015) Training could predict employee engagement through its content andbenefit that employees perceived It was able to be concluded that the essentialrelationship which connect training and engagement has been highlighted in some ofthe 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, andproposed a model which indicates such relationship In that model training variable wascategorized into 4 components including need assessment, training design, trainer anddelivery, and evaluation By conceptually

conducting, he found that all of the components have positive relations with training employee engagement and thus concluded that “employee training will bepositively related with post-training employee engagement” (Ahmed et al., 2015).

Figure 2.2 Training components and employee engagement model

(Source: Ahmed et al., 2015)Although there were number of studies investigated employee training and itsrelationship with employee engagement from the past which indicated the positiveimpact, recent researches, however, released some inconsistent results Semwal et

al (2017) conducted study from a sample of 127 employees in IT companies andindicated that training vitally contribute to all components of engagement.Notwithstanding, in the effort to find the impact of training and development onengagement from Pakistani banking sector, Ezam et al., (2018) failed to reject the

hypothesis that “training has no significant impact on employees’ engagement” Inother words, training which employees received might not gather high level ofemployee engagement (Ezam et al., 2018) Such results seem to be associated withthe report results provided by Gallup and SHRM mentioned in the first Chapter.

Gap analysis

As mentioned above, the results of recent studies about such relationship wereinconsistent Not just that, several newspaper articles and reports by differentorganizations has indicated the weak connection between training and employeeengagement The inconsistency in the results may be caused by different contexts ofsample, or different in working fields to be more specific Together with studies havebeen reviewed in the previous sections, it is indicated that the results are limited interms of generalizability In other words, there is a gap in literature since studies mainlyfocused on single working field or single country Therefore, the findings of this papermay propose a different view on employee engagement in the context of Vietnam.Besides, although there has papers which conduct the link between training andengagement, there were very few studies which investigate training as a singleindividual function, but as a component of HRD have been found Consequently, theresult of relationship between those two variables may be affected by employees’perception on other HRD components Another possible reason of this inconsistency isthat the relationship between employee training and employee engagement may beaffected by some other relating factors Base on above assumptions, there are two othervariables have been introduced in this paper, with the purposes of testing their differenteffects on the link between training and engagement Specifically, self-efficacy andreward will be tested whether they have mediating effect and moderating effectrespectively on such relationship Since the results found by academic researchers andorganizations have conflicted themselves, there might a suggestion that differentcontext 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 withinVietnamese workplace.

H1: Employee training positively influence employee engagement.

2.3 Self-efficacy

Definition of efficacy is given by Bandura (1977), which considered efficacy as the belief of individuals in their ability to perform a given task and tomeet situational demands According to Bergh and Theron (1999) cited in Stadlerand Kotze (2006), self-efficacy determines whether a person will pursue a specificgoal and how much effort will be put into attaining the stated objective

self-Self-efficacy has three dimensions: magnitude, the level of task difficulty a personbelieves she can attain; strength, the conviction regarding magnitude as strong orweak; and generality, the degree to which the expectation is generalized acrosssituations (Fred C Lunenburg, 2011) The higher the level of self-efficacy, the morelikely the individual will be motivated to persevere in attaining the objective, even ifthere are obstacles impeding him/her An employee’s sense of capability influenceshis perception, motivation, and performance (Bandura, 1997)

Bandura pointed out three ways that self-efficacy can influences learning andperformance 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 intothe job Thirdly, employee perseverance in attempting and adapting to new ortroublesome missions is also influenced by their perception of self-efficacy Thehigher level of self-efficacy, the more confident they are in perceiving andpractically performing and tasks Thus, they will be more persistent in solving thedifficulties (Bandura, 1982) All there effects above may significantly drive thequality 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 previousjob-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 thissource 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 onthe Pygmalion effect, the phenomenon whereby expectation of people can influencethe performance of a particular person Studies showed that employees may performmore greatly when their supervisors or managers believe that they can dosuccessfully However, the effectiveness of this source may be varied depends onvarious 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 tolow outcomes

Past performance

Vicarious experience

Self-efficacyVerbal persuasion

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 helpemployees increase their perception of self-efficacy

According to Bandura (1986, 1997), self-efficacy beliefs are characterized as beingtask- or domain-specific and are suggested to motivate better performance in severalways First, self-efficacy beliefs affect feelings of competency and confidence inone’s perceived skill to perform a required task, which means they strive to reachtheir goals Next, self-efficacy beliefs motivate better performance by increasing thesense 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 whenpursuing 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 withnumerous important variables Self-efficacy positively related to job and personalresources, which in turn result in engagement, among construction workers; self-efficacy and work engagement play the role of mediators in the relationship oftransformational leadership and extra-role working performance (Lorente, 2009) Thestudy by Frayne and Geringer (2000) empirically examined the role of self-efficacy inmediating the relationship between self-management training and job performance.Such researchers noted that self-efficacy partially mediated the relationship betweenself-management training and two of the performance measures was very important fortheory and practice (Carter et al., 2016) Besides, Carter (2016) in his research statedthat there are considerable conceptual parallels between self-efficacy and employeeengagement, in the construction of individual motivations and mentioned it as anoverlap Then, his findings showed that self-efficacy and employee engagementindependently positively affect the outcomes of performance, however the effects willvary depends on the nature of task and the performance appraisal measurement High-level of self-efficacy may differ the results and consequences both positively andnegatively based on different activities and behaviors (Lorente, 2009) Besides, severalstudies have found a significant and consistent relationship between self-efficacy andemployee 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-efficacywas illustrated as a vital factor which caused the negative feelings of employees in theirworkplace, thus raised the level of depression and anxiety (Schwarzer, 1999 cited byVentura et al., 2015), and finally burnout (Cherniss, 1993; Llorens, García, & Salanova,2005), consequently In contrast, high level of self-efficacy drives optimistic behaviorand emotion, which facilitate the employee engagement (Llorens, Schaufeli, et al.,2007; Salanova, Llorens, et al., 2011; Vera et al., 2012) The relationship between self-efficacy and work engagement

is under the mediating impacts of employees’ perception of work and familydemand, and work – life balance In particular, work – family demand negativelysignificantly mediated the link between self-efficacy and work – life balance; butthe positive effect was found with the mediating role of work – life balance whichinfluence the relationship between self-efficacy and employee engagement (Wen etal., 2017) Beforehand, in 2007, Xanthopoulou indicated that self-efficacy, as one ofthree personal resources, had mediating effect on work engagement Moreover, aresearch found that self-efficacy plays a vital role in predicting the perception ofemployees on challenge and hindrance demands, which are strongly related toburnout and engagement Particularly, the more self-efficacy employees have, themore they will engage to work, and conversely (Ventura et al., 2015).

Since the relationship between training and employee engagement are still inconcern and the work of researchers provide inconsistent result about it, the author

of this paper assumes this relationship is under a mediating effect of anothervariable When considering and reviewing self-efficacy as a possible factor, theauthor found that related result almost associated with the assumption.Consequently, self-efficacy has been chosen as mediator and its effect on thefocused relationship will be tested in this study

H2: Employee’s self-efficacy positively mediates the relationship between employee training and employee engagement.

2.4 Reward

Due to the diversity of classifications, this study follows the definition of rewardwhich 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 ordischarging a responsibility.” (Collins, 1995), which can be categorized into 2types: intrinsic reward and extrinsic reward “Intrinsic rewards are valued outcomes

received as internal enjoyment of task performance”; “Extrinsic rewards are valuedoutcomes received from an external source or person” (Schermerhorn et al., 2014).Motivation, including reward, is an essential component in building employeeengagement and several related aspects, for the final purpose of enhancingperformance and generating organizational outcomes The Institute for EmploymentStudies (IES) identified a model of employee engagement, in which engagement isthe combination of three components: commitment, motivation and organizationalcitizenship behavior According to IES, employee who engage will highly believe

in their organizations and consider their work for making organizations better

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 alsoshow that reward in many types can be an important practice that drive employeeengagement and organizational performances “Individual performance-related payand profit-related bonuses” were referred to 2 of 18 HRD practices which influenceperformance and commitment of employees (Guest, 2003) Team rewards and

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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 andbenefits, 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 andwork-related performance put a significant impact on employees’ intention to givediscretionary effort to work (Corporate Leadership Council, 2004) Engagement andcommitment are also under the strong impacts of fair pay (Heintzman and Marson,2005) Performance pay is illustrated as one the causes of engagement among topperformers of organization (WorldatWork, 2004) WorldatWork also proposed a model

of total reward system, which indicate multi-directional relationships among thevariables of organizational practices, reward, satisfaction, engagement and performance,

in which the role of total reward is centralized and highly appreciated

Total reward strategies

Attract Organizational

 Compensation Motivate

Employee culture

Business Retain

 Benefits

satisfaction Business

managers and professionals at Turkish bank and found that Work-life experiences,consists of rewards, predicted work engagement In determining whether there is a

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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 thatwhich category of total reward had the most effect on engagement (Hoole et al.,2016) Especially, using both intrinsic and extrinsic reward can help organizationselevate the rate of employee engagement (Ram and Prabhakar, 2011) Similar resultwas also found out even earlier by Roberts and Davenport, that a workplace wherereaps more kinds of rewards will be able to generate engagement among theiremployees (Roberts et al., 2002) In a study about the relationship between intrinsicreward and employee engagement in South African, the result showed that there had

a considerable correlation between the two variables, and such correlation varyunder 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 moreimpacts related to job satisfaction than intrinsic rewards More recently, Khan etal.’s study (2017) findings expressed that both intrinsic and extrinsic rewardpositively 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) Inother words, if reward being perceived appropriate by employees to their ability, willmotivate them to be more engaged and give more effort Employees will feel that theirability and performance being highly appreciated by the organization, and thus engagemore with the work when reward is at right place Previous studies recommended thatvarious reward systems which organizations apply will essentially positively affect toemployee attitude and behavior at work in different ways (Maister; Guthrie, cited byWaal & Jansen, 2013) For example, employees who is paid out stock and dividend willfeel highly involved and engaged because their benefit will stick to organizationalperformance; or they will feel more responsible and decisive if the reward systemenable them to strengthen their competencies and make decision

themselves Researchers also suggest that reward which is perceived as fair amongemployees and proportional to their contributions and organizational outcomes willmotivate employees to commit, engage and exert in the workplace (Jackson, Rossi,Hoover, and Johnson, 2012) The more fairly the employee believes they arerewarded, the greater level of engagement he or she will have in the jobs, and gofurther beyond the routine expectations to achieve higher performance andoutcomes (Chebat et al., 2002) In result, reward is indicated as a great importantmotivation mechanism in improving employee behavior and attitude, which helpsupport organizational goals (Haal-Ellis, 2014; Waal and Jansen, 2013).

From the results of various academic works, it may be concluded that thediversification of employees’ perception on how they are rewarded will differ theirfeelings, their engagement, and their attitude and behavior at work, based on theirself-beliefs on ability and contributions, as well as the job and organizationalresources that they perceived Consequently, reward has been selected to be amoderator for testing its impacts on the link between employees’ perception oftraining 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.

2.5 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 betweenemployee training and employee engagement separately?

CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

In this chapter, the conceptual research model and measuring instruments will beexplained in detail Simultaneously, the author will introduce the research methodused to conduct the study, including data collection method and procedure,questionnaire design and sampling design

3.1 Research design

The quantitative research approach is specialized in “testing objective theories byexamining the relationship among variables” (Creswell et al., 2018) These variablescan be respectively statistically measured and analyzed in form of numbers, byusing some kinds of instrument and statistical procedure The objective of this paper

is explaining the relationship between variables: employee training perception andemployee engagement, and through reviewing previous literatures, the author wants

to explore more such relationship under impact of other factors, driving severalassumptions and hypotheses which are proposed to be tested deductively Thus,based on the viewpoint of Creswell et al, the quantitative approach is suitable forconducting this study Quantitative methodology has been chosen for using in thispaper, in terms of collecting and analyzing primary data Besides, backgroundtheories 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 thispaper “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 andopinion of employee on their training received, their self-efficacy, reward and level ofengagement, in order to investigate the relationships among them Hence, surveyresearch is considered as the most suitable approach A survey using questionnairewhich including a number of close-ended questions, or items, would be distributed tothe citizens who meet the requirement mentioned in “Scope of the study” part

Collected data would be analyzed using SPSS software The results and analyseswill be discussed later in chapter 3.

3.2 Conceptual research model

Variables and measuring instruments

In this study, the proposed conceptual research model was a moderated mediationmodel with 4 variables: perception on training satisfaction, self-efficacy, reward andemployee engagement The previous papers were reviewed to describe the variablesand their theoretical characteristics, as well as their related issues This approachenables the authors to get and provide better understanding about them within theavailable evidences, as well as generate some assumptions in order to proposed theconceptual framework and hypotheses

of employee about training activity they received on the job and the support oforganization for such training activity, by using 5-point Likert scale The examples ofitem are “Overall, the training I receive on the job meets my needs.”, “Overall, I amsatisfied 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 uses6-point Likert scale to measure items Results of studies which comparing the differentrange of Likert scale showed that according to the construct validity, it was considerednot 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 ofstatistical information such as mean, standard deviation, correlation,

reliability or validity (Leung, 2011) Besides, a forum hosted by Infosurv – aresearch service organization – found that the 5-point scale is more preferred, withthe 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 maylead 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 paperdecided to choose 5-point scale to use for measuring the training satisfaction

Self-efficacy

From the late of 20th century, researchers become keen on the term general 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

self-of their ability to perform across a variety self-of different situations” Among severalscales developed to measure GSE, the works by Sherer et al (1982) seems to be themost 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 thatNGSE has higher advances in terms of both reliability and validity, although it isshorter Moreover, in the work for comparing 3 of GSE scales including NGSE, theresult indicated a considerable strength of NGSE related to the discrimination,information of item and relative efficiency (Charles et al., 2006) Hence, the authordecided to use NGSE to measure self-efficacy The scale includes 8 5-point Likert scaleitems, 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.”

Reward

For measuring perception on reward, this study uses the scale which develop byworks of Kuvaas et al (2006, 2009) and Dysvik et al (2013), and those scales wasadopted by Kuvaas et al (2017) in order to investigate the difference in effectsbetween intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to employee outcome The scale consists

of 10 items which measuring 2 different types of reward For intrinsic reward (IR)

there has 6 items, and 4 items for extrinsic reward (ER) All items are evaluated follow5-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 anexternal incentive to strive for in order to do a good job.” for extrinsic type

Employee engagement

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 conditionsfor engagement: focus is provided, activation, and positive affect; simultaneouslythere has three dimensions of engagement: intellectual engagement (IE), affectiveengagement (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 focushard on my work.”, “I share the same work values as my colleagues.” and “I feelpositive about my work.” The validation process revealed that ISA engagementscale could be more beneficial than one of the most widely used instrument formeasuring 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 responsequality (Sachdev, S B., & Verma, H V., 2004) Besides, Dawes, J (2008) statedthat with a 5-point scale, it is quite simple for the interviewer to read out thecomplete list of scale descriptors

Conceptual research model

Reward (RE)Self-efficacy

-EmployeeTraining

engagement (EE)perception

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

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