The following is a summary of the research and practice implications from: Sonnentag, S., Binnewies, C., Mojza, E. J. (2010). Staying well and engaged when demands are high: The role of psychological detachment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(5), 965-976.

Should a person’s life revolve around work? High job demands, which are signified by a high level of quantitative job demands reflected in a high workload and time pressure, are very common in present-day jobs, and due to the fact that organizations see positive performance results from very demanding jobs, high job demands are not going anywhere anytime soon.

For employees who are faced with too many job demands, continuously being busy with job-related thoughts during their time off reduces work engagement and drains energy, which will impair their well-being in the long term. Fortunately, psychological detachment is a remedy for such a problem.

Detachment vs. Disengagement

Detachment from work (during off-job time) refers to the process of temporarily disengaging from work while one is not on the job. As a result, detachment provides employees the chance to calm down and rebuild or recover their emotional and energetic resources. Detachment can therefore be viewed as a buffer against the negative effects of having excessive job demands, such as constant mental or physical stress, and job strains.

This is an important distinction from disengagement, which occurs during work hours and can be viewed as a counterproductive work activity. Disengagement could be caused by a general lack of interest in one’s job or in the organization in which one works.

Detachment from High Job Demands

Demanding jobs produce a stressful short-term experience, cause poor well-being over time, and often result in high health care costs. However, detachment from work provides recovery for such impending issues. When organizations provide and encourage detachment outlets for employees, such as vacation days and leisure activities, it facilitates a buffering effect against the negative effects of having too many job demands.

This form of recovery is particularly important because, while high demands might be met with effort and energy investment in the short term, they will eventually lead to negative effects on work engagement in the long term. Excessive job demands are related to an increase in mental and physical complaints and to a decrease in work engagement over a period of time when detachment is low. Lack of detachment from work during off-job time indicates an increase in emotional exhaustion 1 year later.

Practical Implications

These findings are beneficial for those managers who are interested in preventing burnout, or the effects of long-term exhaustion, amongst employees. Managers should also note that factors that relate to job-stress recovery outside of work are important. An unhealthy preoccupation with work during off-job time speeds along employees’ energy depletion processes as well as their likelihood of burnout. Additionally, organizations may have annual training reminding at risk employees to detach from their jobs while away from work. On specific example of this would be for an organization to encourage employees to create an after work competitive intramural sports team that will facilitate detachment.

Employees should detach from work during off-job time, especially when job demands are high. For instance, employees could use rituals such as winding down at the end of the work day or actively use commuting time to disengage from job-related thoughts. Additionally, employees may seek to engage in off-job activities that command their full attention in order to increase their detachment from work during off-job time, such as participating in a special interest group or volunteering iin a church or community service organization.

Interpretation by:

Kandace Waddy

DeGarmo Group

The following a summary of the research and practice implications from: Swider, B. W., Boswell, W. R., & Zimmerman, R. D. (2011). Examining the job search–turnover relationship: The role of embeddedness, job satisfaction, and available alternatives. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(2), 432-441.

Have you ever searched for available jobs, even though you were employed at the time?  If so, you are not alone – employed individuals are currently the largest population of job seekers. With so many employees perusing the job market, managers may find it is to their advantage to know that certain influential factors could sway their employees to stay or leave. Specifically, managers may be interested to learn that job satisfaction, the availability of job alternatives, and job investment (i.e. embeddedness), affect employee turnover decisions.

The Job Search – Turnover Relationship

Job searching, or the active pursuit of job opportunities in other organizations, is a precursor to the majority of voluntary employee turnovers.  Despite this trend, all job searchers are not necessarily job leavers and all job leavers are not necessarily job searchers. Research has shown that an employee’s job searching behavior is not enough to accurately predict whether he or she quits. However, managers should keep in mind that job searching gives employees the opportunity to compare their current job against an unknown number of alternative opportunities.

Deciding Factors: To Stay or to Leave

As a manager, you may wonder –  if many of my employees are actively looking at available job opportunities, how can I prevent them from leaving for another offer?

In order to retain job searching employees, managers should be aware of what factors affect their decisions to stay with their current job, or quit and pursue another opportunity. The following are three factors that affect employee’s decisions to stay or leave:

• Job Satisfaction: Employees who are less satisfied with their current working conditions are more likely to accept an alternative opportunity.  One reason for this stems from the intention behind the job search.  Dissatisfied employees are more likely to job search with the intention of finding a replacement job, whereas their satisfied peers are more likely to be testing the market, seeking leverage in their current employment, etc.  In addition, dissatisfied job searchers may accept lower quality job offers than their satisfied peers. In contrast, satisfied employees require substantially better offers before they are willing to leave their current organization.
• Job Embeddedness: Job embeddedness is the degree to which an employee feels unable or unwilling to leave his or her job.  This concept is a combination of three sub-components regarding the employee’s: 1) formal and informal ties with the organization, 2) compatibility with the organization, and 3) cost or sacrifice that would be forfeited by leaving the organization. As a job searcher’s level of job embeddedness increases, the risk of turnover decreases.  In other words, job searchers who have fostered ties with their organization, consider themselves to fit in well with their job and organizational culture, and consider the cost of leaving to be great, are less likely to actually accept a suitable alternative.
• Job Alternatives: A third factor that affects job searchers is the availability of suitable alternative positions. In general, the probability of turnover increases when a job searcher has multiple alternatives to choose from. With that in mind, the employees who are highly marketable, or who have a large number of potential alternatives, are at the greatest risk for turnover.

Practical Implications

It is important for employers and HR managers to foster positive work attitudes and embeddedness in order to retain employees. Workplace initiatives, such as job enrichment and providing a supportive work climate, are proven tactics for increasing job satisfaction.  Job embeddedness can be promoted within the organization ( e.g. work teams and committees) or within the community (e.g. facilitate home ownership).

HR managers may also want to target retention efforts for the high risk individuals, or those who are less satisfied, not embedded in their jobs, and have other alternatives available.  To do so, organizations may benefit from assessing employee work attitudes, employee links to the organization and community, and occupation-level labor trends.

Interpretation by:

Kelly Whalen

DeGarmo Group

The following is a summary of the research and practice implications from: Tierney, P., & Farmer, S.M. (2011). Creative self-efficacy development and creative performance over time. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(2), 277-293.

Employee creativity is a critical component of an organization’s ability to be innovative. This creativity, also known as creative performance, refers to an employee’s ability to generate novel and practical ideas or solutions. One effective way that supervisors can increase creative performance is by enhancing their employees’ belief in their own ability to be creative. This belief in one’s own ability to generate creative ideas or solutions is called creative self-efficacy.

Factors Influencing Creative Self-Efficacy

Listed below are two broad factors that play a role in increasing creative self-efficacy in employees.

• Perceived Creativity Expectations. This refers to the degree to which an employee perceives expectations for creative performance from their supervisor. If employees believe that their supervisors have high creative expectations of them, then they are more likely to have high creative self-efficacy. This relationship exists because when employees know that their supervisors believe in their creative abilities, employees strive to meet those creative expectations and, in turn, gain more confidence in their creative abilities over time.
• Formal Job Creativity Requirements. This refers to the degree to which a job requires the employee to create novel solutions to problems that they encounter on the job. Unlike perceived creativity expectations, when a job’s formal creativity requirements are increased, employees experience a decrease in creative self-efficacy. This relationship may exist because greater formal job demands, in general, tend to lessen an employee’s feelings of self-efficacy as well as his overall job performance.

Why is it Important to Promote Creative Self-Efficacy?

It is important to promote creative self-efficacy in employees because increases in creative self-efficacy are related to increases in creative performance. Hence, supervisors should strive to increase creative self-efficacy in their employees by using the factors described above because creative self-efficacy gives employees the confidence they need to be creative problem-solvers.

Practical Implications

To some degree, organizations can shape creative self-efficacy and creative performance in their employees. Jobs vary greatly in how much creativity they require. For jobs that require a great deal of creativity, supervisors should be provided with leadership training on how to increase creative self-efficacy in their employees.

Supervisors should be mindful when adding more creativity requirements into their employees’ jobs because these additional formal demands can decrease employees’ confidence in their ability to be creative problem-solvers. When additional creativity requirements must be added, supervisors should also provide employees with additional training in creativity skill development in order to meet these new job requirements.

Interpretation by:

Mackenzi Harmon

DeGarmo Group

The following is a summary of the research and practice implications from: Kaplan, S., Bradley, J. C., Luchman, J. N., & Haynes, D. (2009). On the role of positive and negative affectivity in job performance: A meta-analytic investigation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94, 162-176.

People are predisposed to experiencing certain levels of approach-related arousal emotions and avoidance-related arousal emotions which influence different aspects of their job performance. Approach-related arousal is generally associated with feelings such as happiness, elation, or feeling energetic. Avoidance-related arousal is generally associated with feelings involving negative emotions. These predispositions, which are called positive affect and negative affect, are different from the emotions a person will experience in reaction to specific events in that affect shows stability across time and even situations. It is important to realize that positive affect and negative affect are not opposite ends of a continuum – one can have high levels of one but not the other, or can have high or low levels of both types at the same time.

Examples of different affect profiles include:

• A person who experiences anxiety or fear (high on both levels). This profile is high in positive affect because anxiety arouses a person to be alert, but it is also high in negative affect because it makes a person want to escape from something.
• A person who feels very relaxed, laid-back (low on both levels). Such a person isn’t experiencing particularly high positive or negative arousal.
• A person who is bored (high in negative affect, low in positive affect). This profile indicates someone who is unenergetic and experiencing negative arousal.
• A person who is cheerful and energetic (high in positive affect, low in negative affect). Such a person isn’t experiencing negative feelings but is experiencing a high level of positive arousal.

Emotions and Performance

Recent evidence provides a clearer understanding of the role of dispositional emotions in work performance. Specifically:

• Positive emotions are related to increased task performance ratings by supervisors
• Negative emotions are related to decreased task performance ratings by supervisors
• Positive affect is associated with increases in organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) – i.e., work behaviors that are helpful but not required of one’s position, like volunteering for overtime or assisting a coworker
• Negative affect is associated with decreases in OCBs
• Negative affect is associated with increases in withdrawal and counterproductive workplace behaviors (CWBs) – e.g., theft, absenteeism, abuse, sabotage, etc.
• Negative affect is associated with increased occupational injury

Explaining these Associations

Evidence indicates that the relationships between positive and negative affect and the dimensions of job performance may be mediated by the factors fairness, job satisfaction, and stress. Mediation refers to a factor being a reason why one variable (e.g., emotion) influences another variable (e.g., performance). That is, emotions are thought to influence one or more of these three factors, which then affect performance, in the following ways:

• Perceived fairness is a significant mediator between positive affect and task performance and OCBs
• Perceived fairness is a significant mediator between negative affect and task performance, OCBs, CWBs, and withdrawal
• Job satisfaction is a significant mediator between both positive affect and negative affect and OCBs
• Job satisfaction is a significant mediator between negative affect and withdrawal
• Job stress mediates the association between positive affect and task performance/OCBs
• Job stress mediates the associations between negative affect and CWBs/withdrawal

Affect and Personality

Evidence also indicates that positive and negative affect, which exhibit high associations with the personality traits extraversion and neuroticism respectively, are not redundant with those traits in predicting task performance. Positive and negative affect predict task performance even after extraversion and neuroticism have been accounted for.

Implications for Practice

These results clearly indicate that emotional predispositions are important factors in predicting success in different performance categories ranging from productive behavior to destructive behavior. Suggestions for capitalizing on this knowledge to maximize organizational performance include:

• Screen and hire applicants in part based on their dispositional affect, especially for occupations that are inherently stressful.
• Introduce stress management resources for employees. Examples include employee assistance programs (EAPs) and gym membership information.
• Take steps to increase employee perceptions of fair treatment at work. This can be done by following standard procedures for everyone, letting employees have some input or “voice” when appropriate, or providing sufficient information about why certain workplace decisions have been made.
• Strive to reduce a negative work climate while also striving to create a positive work environment. This can involve reducing personal conflicts in the organization and promoting cooperation among employees.

Recent evidence is much clearer about the roles that positive and negative affect play in employee performance. Employers should consider these emotional dispositions when making decisions about how to increase or maintain worker performance in their organizations.

Interpretation by:

Donnie Johnson

DeGarmo Group

The following is a summary of the research and practice implications from: Parish, J.T., Cadwallader, S., & Busch, P. (2008). Want to, need to, ought to: Employee commitment to organizational change. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 21(1), 32-52.

Organizations are under constant pressure to change. Employee commitment to necessary changes is of paramount importance for such changes to be effective.

Understanding commitment to change (C2C)

Commitment to change (C2C), an essential component of a successful change implementation, is best described as a state of mind that ties a person to a particular course of action.

C2C is influenced by organizational commitment, and can be thought of as being comprised of three components:

• Affective commitment (AC2C): feelings of attachment to the organization, and desire to support change initiatives.
• Normative commitment (NC2C): sense of obligation to be supportive of the organization’s plans for change.
• Continuance commitment (CC2C): fear of costs of leaving or resisting organizational changes.

These three components interact with other important antecedents that can affect employees C2C.

The quality of an employee’s relationship with his/her manager, level of job motivation, fit with the organization’s vision, and the level of role autonomy experienced can influence how committed an employee is to change initiatives.

How components of C2C influence success

Each of the components of C2C relate to the antecedents and outcomes of change initiatives.

The three components of commitment to change have real and robust relationships with important organizational outcomes such as improved performance, learning, and implementation success, which are all important for presenting a positive view of the particular change to customers.

Overall recommendations for improving C2C

Understanding and managing C2C is crucial to successful change implementation. Some of the most important steps an organization can take to improve commitment to change include:

• Illustrating to employees how change implementations relate to the “big picture” or overall vision and direction for the organization
• Making efforts to help employees understand the relationship of the change initiatives to the overall success of the organization
• Maintaining strong relationships between employees and management helps employees feel more attached, which makes them feel more obligated to support change initiatives
• Motivating employees in anticipation of change initiatives should be included as part of an implementation plan

Interpretation by:

Kathleen Melcher

DeGarmo Group

The following is a summary of the research and practice implications from: Shaw, J. D., & Gupta, N. (2007). Pay system characteristics and quit patterns of good, average, and poor performers. Personnel Psychology, 60, 903-928.

Determining the foundations of a pay system can be a very difficult dilemma. In most cases, the basis of the pay system will boil down to two main options: Seniority-based pay systems and performance-based pay systems. While the decision may seem to have implications solely in the area of compensation management, an inappropriate pay system choice can lead to higher turnover rates, especially for high performers.

Seniority Versus Performance Pay Systems

Seniority-based pay systems are those in which the primary basis for pay increases is the employee’s tenure. It should be noted that seniority-based pay systems can take into account performance, but the main factor is tenure. Some benefits of seniority-based pay include loyalty, retention, and stability of all staff members, regardless of performance levels.

Performance-based pay systems consider performance as the primary basis for pay increases. As with seniority-based pay systems, other factors, like tenure, can be accounted for in a performance-based system, but employee performance, however conceptualized by the organization, is the impetus in determining pay raises.

Performance-based pay systems can actually lead to a climate in which all employees are working hard to achieve maximum performance. While this certainly sounds like an ideal option, there are several downfalls, such as the potential for high turnover rates as average and lower performing employees can get discouraged when they regularly fail to receive merit increases.

A common analogy used to help conceptualize this is the tournament analogy. The ‘winners’ are the high performers who often receive increases, and the ‘losers’ are the average and low performers who are being passed over for increases. As you would expect, those who consistently lose the tournament are likely to stop playing the game, i.e. quitting.

What Factors Can Alter This Process?

• Pay System Communication

The amount of communication about how pay increase decisions are made is crucial to the functioning of all pay systems. Workers should be told not only how the system is designed, but also how their pay increases compare to the averages within their jobs. This can be best accomplished by talking about pay increases as percentages, thus avoiding negative feelings related to salary differences. A final, very important note about pay system communication is that low levels of pay communication have shown links to increased union-organizing activities.

• Pay Dispersion

The extent to which pay differs across employees in the same job is very important to the effectiveness and implications of pay systems based on both seniority and performance. When pay dispersion is high, there are important implications, especially to the quit rates of high performing employees.

In a seniority-based pay system, quit rates of high performing employees are higher when there is a great deal of pay dispersion. The assumed cause of this relationship is that high performing employees begin to perceive that their greater amounts of effort and performance are not appropriately appreciated by the organization. As a result, high performing employees are likely to leave the organization.

Conversely, when pay dispersion is high in a performance-based pay system, high performing employees tend to be the highest earners, as their high performance is being highly rewarded. In this type of structure, high performers tend to stay with the company, as they feel they are well compensated for their hard work. The downside is, once again, that average and low performing employees are more likely to leave.

Practical Implications

When choosing the emphasis for the pay system of any job within your organization, be sure to:

• Determine what kind of balance you would like to find between a pay system that encourages only the high performers to stay, and one that is inviting to the entire workforce.
• Remember that, while it may sound like a good idea to weed out the low and average performers and only retain the high performers, this can lead to an ongoing cycle of high turnover and its associated costs. Mentoring, training, and other forms of coaching should be utilized to try to raise the performance level of the lower performers.
• Ensure that, regardless of pay system, a high level of pay system communication is present to reduce the likelihood of employee discontent and associated union organization.

Interpretation by:

David Daly

DeGarmo Group

The following is a summary of the research and practice implications from: Mathieu, J.E, & Rapp, T.L. (2009). Laying the foundation for successful team performance trajectories: The roles of team charters and performance strategies. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94 (1), 90-103.

As team-based work becomes an increasingly common and important part of modern organizations, it’s important to ensure that teams use the most effective strategies to maximize performance.

There are two important aspects of team-based work that teams must manage to improve their performance: task-work and teamwork.

• Task-work deals with how teams accomplish work tasks.
• Team-work deals with how teams work with each other and with other teams.

Managing both task-work and team-work requires that teams invest time into planning these activities before starting work on the task at hand. Often, teams consider planning activities to be low-priority, but in reality, putting time into these activities up-front can lead to significant performance gains and reduced process loss in the long run.

Team Charters

A team charter lays out the plans for how the team will manage various teamwork activities, or in other words, an operation plan that will guide the team through the work process. Team charters have several purposes, including:

• Clarifying roles and expectations for team members
• Determining the team’s strengths, as well as areas that may require additional development
• Identifying stakeholders and opportunities that may aid in accomplishing the team’s goals
• Specifying how the team will make decisions if conflicts arise (e.g. through voting vs. consensus)
• Setting up feedback mechanisms and processes for performance evaluation.

The team charter can be developed either by the team as a whole, or by the team leadership or other managers. However, it’s important that all team members agree to the terms of the charter before work begins, so that everyone is “on the same page.” Step-by-step resources about how to develop a team charter are abundant online; a search using the term “team charter” will provide many examples.

Performance Strategies

Performance strategies explicitly delineate what the team intends to do and how they intend to accomplish the required tasks. This includes:

• Prioritizing goals and objectives (short-term and long-term)
• Delineating a plan of action that will address each of the required tasks
• Defining the specific tactics that will be employed to achieve the team’s goals
• Contingency planning and developing alternative strategies to task completion

As with the team charter, make sure that all team members are “on board” with the performance strategy in order to increase commitment and performance.

Teams as dynamic entities

Like living beings, teams can be thought of as having a life cycle with a beginning, middle, and an end. Similar to living creatures, events that take place early in a team’s life can have a profound impact on how it functions later in life. By establishing structured team-work and task-work patterns early on, teams can promote effective functioning for the future. Some components of high-quality planning include:

• Having an orientation toward the future

• High levels of interpersonal interaction between team members

• Accurate knowledge about team strengths and weaknesses

• Clearly-defined roles for team members

• Adequate and accurate resource allocation

Teams that establish a quality charter and performance strategies early in the process will be able to concentrate efforts on performance rather than dealing with administrative issues, mistakes, duplication of work, miscommunications, or other process-loss issues – ultimately leading to higher levels of performance.

Practical Advice

There are several ways to promote increased team-work and task-work among work groups.

• Team-work. Encourage teams to develop charters that are both complete and consistent.
  • Rather than stating that “group meetings will be held as necessary,” a complete charter might lay out a schedule for meetings as well as details on when and where the meetings are to be held and what topics are to be discussed.
  • A consistent charter will match team members’ skills and expertise to their assigned tasks.
• Task-work. Performance strategies should be as specific as possible.
  • Teams should develop performance outcome goals for the future (e.g. yearly, 5 year) in terms of return on investment, revenues, net income, etc.
  • Performance strategies should identify key markets and outline plans to target those markets through pricing, brand image, advertising budget, product line breadth, etc.

The best performance outcomes are a result of a combination of sustained high-quality team-work and task-work. Although the initial time investment into these planning activities is significant, the performance gains that result can be substantial.

Interpretation by:

Michelle Toelle

DeGarmo Group

The following article is a summary of the research and practice implications from: Hartel, C. & Page, K.M. (2009). Discrete emotional crossover in the workplace: The role of affect intensity. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 24 (3), 237-253.

Emotions in the workplace have been frequently discussed for  some time now. Surprisingly, there has been little focus on the amount individuals’ experiences at work are interwoven with the experiences of those they interact with.

This phenomenon is known as crossover- the process by which an individual’s emotional state influences the emotional state of another individual.

When Can Crossover Occur?

Crossover can occur during positive and negative work events. For example, during positive work events (e.g., exciting new project) an employee’s heightened work engagement can crossover to coworkers. On the other hand, during negative work events (e.g. unrewarding, tedious project) an employee’s burnout can crossover.  Also, stress and anxiety have been shown to crossover within colleagues of the same work environment.

Crossover and Affect Intensity

Crossover is partially controlled by the degree an individual experiences emotion, also known as affect intensity.  More specifically, Affect Intensity (AI) is described as the varying intensity in which individuals experience emotions in reaction to workplace events and people such as upcoming deadlines or supervisors.

Individuals with high AI tend to focus more on the negative or positive side of things; therefore, they report stronger emotional reactions than those with low AI.”

Because of their higher emotional reactivity, high AI individuals may be more susceptible to crossover, especially from one individual with high AI to another with high AI.

Thus, understanding AI within each individual may lead to better management of crossover within the work environment.

Implications for Practice

Applying the knowledge of crossover, one should strive to reduce the number of negative work events and encourage a more positive work environment where positive crossover can occur. Specifically, one should implement practices that encourage:”

• Increases in positive emotion and action, which lead to positive resources including creativity and problem solving.
• An “undoing effect,” where those encountering negative emotions (e.g., anger or fear) overcome negative physical reactions more rapidly.
• An “upward spiral,” where individuals are more resilient and thus better able to overcome negative outcomes while seeking out positive ones – through crossover “upward spirals” occur at the individual, group, and team level.

Although these may seem quite obvious, consider the following:  positive emotions have been linked to helping behaviors, creative problem-solving, collaborative negotiation, and effective decision making strategies.  Satisfied employees are more likely to feel engaged at work, be intrinsically motivated, committed to a company, and receive higher performance ratings.  Employee satisfaction can lead to positive crossover effects, which leads to better morale within the workplace and higher positive outcomes.

Overall, positive emotional crossover is likely to have beneficial effects at the individual and organizational level, while understanding negative implications of crossover (e.g., burnout) may allow for better control of these outcomes.  Lastly, understanding affect intensity can help predict individual employees’ susceptibility to emotional crossover

Interpretation by:

Adam Bradshaw

The DeGarmo Group

The following article is a summary of the research and practice implications from:

Organizations frequently  utilize web-based training because of the efficiency and flexibility it offers. As the popularity of this training option increases, so does the need to understand how it can be used most effectively. One demonstrated technique is maximizing learner control.

How Does Learner Control Affect Learning and Retention?

Learner control involves giving individuals a certain degree of control over the training. For example, learner control could be as simple as allowing employees to progress through the training at their own pace or as complex as allowing employees to determine what type of information they are learning. Typically, some degree of control between these two options has been found to be optimal.

When individuals have control over the learning environment, they may be more cognitively engaged, as they focus on information that is relevant and interesting to them. Because of this, they often experience more positive reactions to the training than if they had little or no control. In turn, they may also process the information more thoroughly and deeply, thereby increasing retention.

These positive reactions can be important in keeping trainees motivated, as well as implementing the training in the workplace. This is because as positive reactions towards the training increase, so does the individual’s motivation to complete the training successfully. Additionally, the individual is more likely to have more motivation to apply the learned behaviors or knowledge on the job and be more confident in doing so.

Practical Implications

Because satisfaction with web-based training can affect not only the successful completion of the training but also the individual’s probability she will transfer the training into the workplace, it is important for organizations to be mindful of using learner control when developing and implementing web-based training. Organizations should:

• Design the training with the trainee’s reactions in mind – ensuring individuals will react positively to the training is essential in ensuring trainee engagement and successful implementation in the workplace. This could also be useful to determine if employees will use the control they are granted appropriately, as trainees may not always make choices that will increase their learning/retention.
• Use some degree of learner control – allowing trainees to have some control, such as the ability to select presentation modes, start or pause the training, and review previous material may be beneficial.
• Make the features known to trainees – simply giving the trainee some instruction or education about the various learner control tools available and how to use them most effectively is necessary for the successful execution of a learner controlled web-based training program.

It is in the DeGarmo Group’s opinion that using methods like pilot testing could be useful to ensure that each of these methods are being used to optimize performance. If a strong negative reaction is found, then the training could be modified based on suggestions for improvement.

Using these simple techniques can help to maximize the effectiveness of web-based training. This is increasingly important because of the growing popularity of this training medium. Designing the training with employee reactions in mind, allowing some degree of learner control, and making the features known to trainees can ultimately increase the overall effectiveness of the training.

Interpretation by:

Elizabeth Allen

The DeGarmo Group

The following article is a summary of the research and practice implications from:

Continuous employee development is imperative in order to maintain a competitive edge in today’s constantly changing business environment. Although many organizations realize this need, employees may be reluctant to voluntarily participate in development programs – this may be because the employee does not see the need for development, does not know about development opportunities, does not feel necessary resources/means are available to participate, etc. So how can organizations encourage employees to participate in these voluntary programs without making participation feel mandatory?

Factors Related to Voluntary Participation

Many factors influence employee willingness to participate in development opportunities, including:

• Availability of activities – It is important for employees’ to not only have opportunities for participation, but also have multiple options for participation.  Simply offering a variety of development opportunities and making these opportunities known is crucial to employee involvement. Although this seems somewhat rudimentary, many organizations fail to advertise and publicize development opportunities, which can reduce participation.
• Attitudes and intentions to participate – Employees who believe that development opportunities will be pleasant and worthwhile are more likely to participate. Additionally, if the development will have some utility or future benefit to the individual they may be more likely to participate.
• Subjective norms – Norms and expectations established by other individuals in the organization, both supervisors and peers, can affect an employee’s desire to participate in development opportunities. Additionally, others’ opinions about a specific development opportunity can influence an individuals’ willingness to participate (i.e. coworker has participated in development and discusses their positive/negative experience with another coworker).
• Perceived control and support – Employees must feel as though they have control over whether or not they participate in development. Allowing employees to choose development opportunities can not only encourage participation but can also increase engagement in the development program. Additionally, the perceived support from the organization, supervisor and peers can be important. This can include:
  • Monetary compensation – Company pays for development or rewards the individual monetarily for completing the development program (i.e. pay raise, bonus, etc.).
  • Fostering an organizational climate that encourages development – Company policies and procedures support, reward and recognize employee development. This could include formal recognition of the employee, first choice on work projects or informally acknowledging employees’ efforts.
• Reactions to employee development – An individual’s opinion about a specific development opportunity can also impact willingness to participate in future programs. Positive development experiences in the past will influence the desire to participate in the future. Therefore, both the perception of the training itself AND the perception of trainings in the past can influence employees’ willingness to participate.

Practical Implications

Organizations offering voluntary development opportunities should keep in mind that it is important to:

• Offer a wide variety of quality trainings employees perceive as beneficial and applicable to their job. Employee surveys could be a useful mean in determining what employees perceive as valuable.
• Make these development opportunities known to employees. This can be done through advertising and should make the utility and applicability of the development clear, as well as illustrate how the organization will support the employee.
• Ensure employees are rewarded for their participation (whether it be monetary or recognition) as many times employees are devoting time and effort, above and beyond their normal work duties and responsibilities, to participate in the development.

Organizations that develop a culture and climate that values high quality development could gain a positive reputation with not only their employees, but also other organizations and individuals, which could ultimately also give the organization a competitive edge recruiting employees. Therefore, the organizational benefits of active employee development could extend beyond advancing employee knowledge and should be utilized to the fullest.

Interpretation by:

Elizabeth Allen

The DeGarmo Group