This article meta-analytically summarizes the literature on training motivation, its antecedents, and its relationships with training outcomes such as declarative knowledge, skill acquisition, and transfer. Significant predictors of training motivation and outcomes included individual characteristics (e.g., locus of control, conscientiousness, anxiety, age, cognitive ability, self-efficacy, valence, job involvement) and situational characteristics (e.g., climate). Moreover, training motivation explained incremental variance in training outcomes beyond the effects of cognitive ability. Meta-analytic path analyses further showed that the effects of personality, climate, and age on training outcomes were only partially mediated by self-efficacy, valence, and job involvement. These findings are discussed in terms of their practical significance and their implications for an integrative theory of training motivation.

Traditionally, training researchers have focused on the methods and settings that maximize the reaction, learning, and behavior change of trainees (Tannenbaum & Yukl, 1992). This research has sought to understand the impact of training media, instructional settings, sequencing of content, and other factors on training effectiveness. However, several reviews of training research have emphasized that because the influence of these variables on individuals' learning and behavior varies, research must examine how personal characteristics relate to training effectiveness (Campbell, 1988; Tannenbaum & Yukl, 1992). For example, Pintrich, Cross, Kozma, and McKeachie (1986) wrote that

whereas early instructional psychology dealt primarily with instructional designs involving matters of manipulating presentation and pacing of instructional material, it has become clear that learners seek to learn; they transform what they receive from instruction and create and construct knowledge in their own minds. Thus, what the learner brings to the instructional situation in prior knowledge and cognitive skills is of...