Psychological Conditions as an Antecedent of Training Effectiveness

The burgeoning level on interest in employee engagement has increased in the late 1990s and continued to grow rapidly. It has become the main attraction among practitioners as well as academics from different fields of studies, such as human resource management, human resource development, and psychology. Competiveness in the business environment gives an impetus for companies to find the best method to retain and develop their employees. The companies, whether they are in private or public sectors, have to discover what it takes to improve and sustain the performance of their workforce. This study aimed to investigate the psychological conditions of engagement as an antecedent of training effectiveness. This study adopted Kahn’s psychological conditions of engagement, which encompasses psychological meaningfulness, psychological safety, and psychological availability. It also sought to examine the mediating role of motivation to learn, motivation to transfer, self-efficacy, and learning, on the relationship with training effectiveness. A total of 94 middle managers in the public sector in Malaysia, who attended the leadership assessment programme, participated in this study. A time-lagged design was used to investigate the relationships in this study. For Time 1, data were collected prior to the training programme commencing, Time 2 involved data collection that was performed immediately after the participants finished the training programme, and the final stage of data collection, that is Time 3, was done four (4) months after the managers participated in the programme. The Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyse the data. Based on the study findings, psychological conditions of engagement directly predict motivation to transfer, motivation to learn, and self-efficacy. The results showed that psychological conditions of engagement act as an antecedent of the proposed model. This study underpinned the importance of psychological conditions of engagement as a pre-training condition for transfer of training. Finally, theoretical, practical, and methodological contributions as well as directions for future research were discussed