Study Deck

• 3 strategic goals for learning and development

  • Improving organizational performance
  • Enhancing individual employee performance
  • Developing organizational leaders
• Talent development strategy


  Considers current and future needs and creates the pathways and methods for its talent to adapt, grow, and sustain high performance
• 3 pillars of needs assessment

  • Needs Assessment: the process of evaluating the organization, individual employees and employees' tasks to determine what kinds of training and learning, if any, are necessary
  • Tasks-process of identifying the taks and competencies that training should emphasize, where to look for task need assessment?
  • Employees-do performance deficiencies result from a competency gap - lack of KSAs, or smth else? Can training resolve the gap? Who needs training?
  • Organizations-Organizations should examine strategic priorities and culture, norms, resources limitations for training
• Readiness for learning


  A combination of employee characteristics and positive work environment that permit learning
• Indicators of employee readiness to learn

  • Learning skills - cognitive ability, includes being able to use written and spoken language, solve math problems, and use reasoning to solve problems
  • Motivation
  • Permanent or temporary employee
  • Lack of situational constraints (lack of money, time, tools)
• Objectives of training

  Clarify what the training is supposed to accomplish, provide a basis for measuring whether the program succeeded
• Effective training objectives


  • Include a statement of what the employee is expected to do, the quality or level of performance that is acceptable, and the conditions under which the employee is to apply what they learned
  • Include performance standards that are measurable
  • Identify the resources needed to carry out the desired performance or outcome
• Training methods

  • Presentation method: Lectures, workbooks, video clips, podcasts, websites
  • Hands-on method: On-the-job training, simulations, role-plays, computer games
  • Group or Team-building methods: Group discussions, experiential/action learning
• Measures of training effectiveness

  • Reaction (individual): Measure participants' initial reaction
  • Learning (individual): Measure how much information was effectively absorbed
  • Behaviour (individual): Measure how much the training has influenced the behaviour of the participants
  • Results (organizational): Measure and analyze the impact of the training at the business level
• Opportunity cost is a signal word for measuring the return on investment of training
• Approaches to Development

  • Formal Education
  • Assessment
  • Job Experiences
  • Interpersonal Relationships
• Formal Education


  • At workplace or off-site
  • Workshops and short courses
  • University/college programs
  • Conferences
  • Certifications
• Assessment


  Collecting information and providing feedback to employees about their behaviour, communication style, or skills - information must be shared with the employee, employee needs suggestions for enhancing current skills and for using skills already learned
• Assessment


  • Used to identify employees with leadership potential to measure current employees' strengths and areas for development
• Assessment centre


  May engage multiple evaluators (assessors) to evaluate current employees' performance on a number of exercises - usually in an offsite location and about 6-12 employees participate at a time - used to identify whether employees hace the personality characteristics, administrative skills and interpersonal skills needed for managerial jobs - valid for predicting job potential performance
• 360-degree feedback

  Gain feedback from everyone around you (self, peers/collegues, supervisors/managers, customers) - involves rating the individual in terms of skills, competencies, and work related behaviours - the results show how they were rated on each item and how self-evaluations fiffer from the raters perspective the employee then creates developmental goals based on the identified strengths and weaknesses - provides multiple perspectives, establishes formal communications about behaviour and skill ratings between employees and their internal and external customers - most effective if the rating instrument enables reliable or consistent ratings, assesses behaviours related to the organization's success, focuses on developing strengths not just correcting weaknesses and is easy to use
• Job Experiences

  • Job enlargement
  • Job rotation
  • Transfers
  • Promotions
  • Downward moves
  • Externships
  • Sabbaticals
• Job enlargement


  Adding challenges or new responsibilities to employee's current jobs
• Job rotation


  Moving employees through a series of job assignments in one or more functional areas - helps employees gain an appreciation for the company's goals, inc their understanding of different company functions, develop a network of contacts, and improves problem solving and decision making skills
• Transfers


  The organization assigns an employee to a position in a different area of the company - not necessarily mean more responsibilities or compensation - usually lateral moves: movies to a job with a similar level of responsibility, may involve relocation to another department, location, or even to another country
• Promotions


  Moving an employees to a position with greater challenges more responsibility and accountability than the previous job - more willing to accept
• Downward moves


  When an employee is given less responsibility and authority - may be because of poor performance or to develop different skills (gain an understanding on how the team works, how the work gets done on lower levels)
• Externships


  Send an employee to another organization, different branches in the group of organizations
• Sabbaticals


  Take time off to focus on the core of your job, renew or develop skills
• Interpersonal Relationships

  • Mentor
  • Coach
• Identifying what the company is trying to accomplish (goals/objectives)


  Develop employee goals and actions to achieve these outcomes
• Outcomes


  • Benefit the customers, employees' colleagues or team members and the organization itself
• Goals, behaviours and activities

  • Should be measurable and become part of the employee's job description
  • Based on job analysis and job description
  • Must be specific
  • Should be fair criteria/controllable by employee
  • Quantifiable and measurable standards
• Effective Performance Feedback

  1. Organizational support - providing employees with training, necessary resources and tools, and ongoing feedback between the employee and manager that focuses on accomplishments as well as issues and challenges that influence performance

  2. The employee and manager have to value feedback and exchange it on a regular basis

  3. The manager needs to make time to provide ongoing feedback to the employee and learn how to give and receive it

  4. Feedback should be frequent - not once a year

  5. Create the right context for the discussion

  6. Ask the employee to rate their performance in advance

  7. Have ongoing collaborative conversations

  8. Provide balanced and accurate feedback that emphasizes behaviour and goal setting
• Evaluating performance


  1. The manager and employee discuss and compare targeted goals and supporting behaviour with actual results

  2. Formal performance evaluation or appraisal

  3. Attributes: Personality - Emphasizes the degree to which employees possess certain characteristics (cognitive abilities, personality)

  4. Behaviour - what the person really did, i.e. handled a customer successful

  5. Results - outcomes of job - i.e. how many customers the employee handled successfully
• Identifying what the employee can do to capitalize on performance strengths and address gaps

  Identifying training needs; adjusting the type or frequency of feedback the manager provides; clarifying, adjusting, or modifying performance outcomes; discussing behaviours or activities that need improvement
• Simple ranking


  Requires managers to rank employees in their group from the highest to lowest performer
• Simple ranking

  • Low in validity - to state a performance measure as broadly as "highest/lowest" does not define what exactly is effective or ineffective about ones contribution to the organization
• Forced-distribution (worst)


  Assigns a certain percentage of employees to each category (Outstanding (10%); Exceeds (20%), Meets (60%), Poor (10%))
• Forced-distribution


  • Works best if the members of a group really do vary this much in terms of their performance
  • A manager of a group of high performers would have a difficult time placing a member in a lower category as it may be inaccurate and can dec morale
• Advantages of forced-distribution

  • Simple to use
  • Avoids rating error like central tendency
• Disadvantages of forced-distribution

  • Fairness
  • Reliability
  • Not developmental
• Ranking counteracts the tendency to avoid controversy by rating everyone favourably or near the centre of the scale
• Simple ranking system leaves the basis for ranking open to interpretation
• Ranking may not be helpful for development and may hurt morale or even legal challenges