Although organizations invest heavily on employee training, the effectiveness of employee training programs has not been well-established. In the current study, we examine the training delivery features of employee training programs to derive a better understanding of features that may be of best benefit in the improvement of employee affective outcomes. Specifically, and via the use of meta-analysis (k = 79 studies totaling 107 independent effect sizes), we focus on two broad classes of affective employee training outcomes including attitudinal and motivational outcomes. Results evidence support for the effectiveness of employee workplace training interventions and indicate that employee training programs associated with attitudinal versus motivational outcomes require different features while being delivered to reach optimal effectiveness.

 

Intensive competition in the 21st-century workplace has shaped the nature of work such that employees are under pressure because of increasingly demanding workloads and blurred boundaries between their work and personal lives. These dramatic changes have been evidenced to impact employee attitudinal and motivational outcomes such as organizational commitment, job satisfaction, stress, strain, and burnout (Ilies et al., 2015; Knight et al., 2017; van Woerkom & Meyers, 2019). Accordingly, organizations are increasingly turning to employee training programs for the best benefit of their precious human resource talent to stay competitive in the job market (Bell & Moore, 2018; Sitzmann &...