VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY VIETNAM JAPAN UNIVERSITY HOANG VU DUONG THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRAINING PERCEPTION AND EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT: IMPACTS OF PERCEPTION OF REWARD AND SELF-EFFICACY MASTER THESIS BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION Hanoi, 2019 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY VIETNAM JAPAN UNIVERSITY HOANG VU DUONG THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRAINING PERCEPTION AND EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT: IMPACTS OF PERCEPTION OF REWARD AND SELF-EFFICACY MAJOR: BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION CODE: 60340102 RESEARCH SUPERVISORS DR. TRAN HUY PHUONG ASSOC. KODO YOKOZAWA Hanoi, 2019 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ACKOWLEDGEMENT First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Tran Huy Phuong and Assoc.
Kodo Yokozawa, who are my supervisors, for their guidance, encouragement and useful comments on my master thesis. These considerably help me in completing this research work. I also would like to say thank to Vietnam Japan University and all lecturers here, especially in program of MBA, for giving me opportunity to study and experience in international and academic environment, which provides me valuable knowledge both theoretically and practically. Furthermore, I want to thank all staffs of VJU, especially Ms.
Huong of from MBA program, for greatly supporting me during 2 years studying. Last but not least, I want to express my gratitude to all of my friends, especially Ms. Nguyen Huyen Trang and Ms. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Anh for their help and encouragement, which academically and mentally support me at any difficult time.
Sincerely, Hoang Vu Duong LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES LIST OF TABLES LIST OF ABBREVIATION CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION. Research scope and objects. The structure of the paper .3 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW .25 CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY. Conceptual research model .27 Variables and measuring instruments .28 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Employee engagement .29 Conceptual research model.
Population, sample and data collection .31 Questionnaire design and administration .32 Sample and data collection process .33 CHAPTER 4: DATA ANALYSIS. Reliability and validity. Regression analysis and hypotheses testing .39 CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATION. Contribution and implication.
Limitation and future research .70 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2. Summary of antecedents and consequences of employee engagement. Training components and employee engagement model. Sources of Self-efficacy.
Engagement Diagnostic Tool: National Health Service. Total reward system. Conceptual research model. Statistical moderating model .43 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF TABLES Table 3.1: Frequency of demographic information of respondents .1: Coding of variables .2: Descriptive statistics of all variables .3: Overall Cronbach’s alpha for each variable and sub-variable .4: Item-total statistics for Intrinsic reward variable .5: Rotated component matrix .6: Pearson correlation matrix .1: Summary of the results of hypotheses testing .46 LIST OF ABBREVIATION HR human resources HRD human resources development HRM human resources management JTJSS Job Training and Job Satisfaction Survey SHRM Society of Human Resources Management UWES Utrecht work engagement scale LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.
Research motivation Employee engagement is increasingly becoming a vital concept which has been believed that it directly results in higher employee performance and organizational performance. Mike Johnson (2004) wrote in his book named “The New Rules of Engagement” that “the ability to engage employees, to make them work with our business, is going to be one of the greatest organizational battles of the coming 10 years.”, which was a crucial prediction about the importance of employee engagement for the future of industries. After that, several academic papers and practical reports have stressed employee engagement as an essential factor which may drive business outcomes. In an article named as “Why Employee Engagement?” (2012) on Forbes by Kruse, there are 28 academic studies had been reviewed that they show the correlations between employee engagement and numerous other aspects of business administration: service; sale; quality; safety; retention; sale, profit and total shareholder returns.
Singh (2016) in his own study stated that “For past several years, employee engagement has been an important concern in the corporate world.” According to that paper, organizations cannot get and sustain their loyal customers by products and process only, but also need “highly-motivated, dedicated and involved employees”, or employees who has high engagement, in other word. Thus, employee engagement in recent time has been widely and deeply investigated in by organizations and researchers, in order to get better understanding about it, hence can utilize it for better outcomes. However, Gallup’s report showed that only 15% of employees are engaged at work in 2017 worldwide. Such numbers indicate several chances for increasing level of engagement, thus generate higher outcomes.
Since employee is the most valuable asset to organizations, it is obviously critical for companies to improve employee performance through types of training activities. It is a key factor in organizational management. It is seemed that training is one of the 1 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ways for organizations to enhance level of engagement of employees. Annual reports on employee satisfaction and engagement by Society of Human Resources Management showed many conditions for employee engagement, including training and development.
However, training and development took account for almost the lowest position in the recent years (SHRM, 2015, 2016, 2017), despite the fact that several studies mentioned significant impacts of training on engagement. These indications suggest the need to have a deeper look at such relationship and become the significant motivations for conducting this study. Research objectives Basically, the objective of this research is to explore the link between employee training and employee engagement in current Vietnamese context. According to a report about Employee Engagement & Retention in Vietnam (Towers Watson, 2010), in the period of 4 years from 2007 to 2010, the percentage of employee engagement in Vietnam had remained stable at around 78%, which was just ahead of the Asia Pacific Region.
Whereby, the possible reasons for this high level are management systems, employee perceptions on company image, effective performance evaluation, empowerment and sophistication. However, Brands Vietnam – an electronic portal with high reputation in Vietnam, showed that this indication has declined considerably by about 10%, stayed at 70% in 2017, and even lower in 2015 and 2016. Although it still accounted for a good level in comparison with the level of the world and Asia, this decrease has been a warning for organizations in Vietnam. Together with the number which is indicated by Gallup mentioned above, it is suggested that the employee engagement should be improved, and there have been several opportunities for enhancing the business as well as talent management for companies in Vietnam.
Thus, based on the practical situation and previous academic studies, this paper aims to explain and explore the relationship of the two important Human Resources Management (HRM) aspects: employee training and employee engagement, in order 2 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com to propose suggestions to improve the level of engagement for organizations in Vietnam, hence enrich the outcomes and performance for those companies. Research scope and objects Basically, the scope of the study will be employees who have working experience for a company in Vietnam and received training activities while working. Besides, since the employee engagement is a psychological and behavioral term, it is understandable that other variables should be psychologically and behaviorally studied, from the view point of employee. Particularly, this research has investigated in the perception and satisfaction of employees on the organizational training activities they received, their self-efficacy and perception on reward received from organization, in order to see the relationship between those factors on their perceived employee engagement.
It will be discussed further on the next Chapter. The structure of the paper The paper starts with a chapter which provide an introduction for the study. After that, it continues with 4 chapters of reviewing literature, method for study, data collection and analysis, and findings and conclusions. Particularly: Chapter 1 discusses about the introduction with research motivation, research objectives, scope and objects.
Chapter 2 reviews and summarizes the previous papers which related to the variables in this study, as well as proposes research questions and hypotheses. Chapter 3 provides information about the approach method, research model and method of collecting data. Chapter 4 discusses the data analysis, and summarizes the results of the study. Chapter 5 concludes the work with the discussion about findings.
Besides, this chapter also states the limitation and suggestions for future studies. 3 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter deals with theoretical parts of the key concepts in this study, and reviews of the papers which researched about related issues. Employee engagement The definition of employee engagement, for nearly 3 decades of researching and developing, is still raising a controversy among researchers and organizations. In other words, there still have no certain definition for this term, but it varied depends on how researchers and people look at it.
The first time when the term “engagement” had been conceptualized was in 1990, by Kahn. At that time, he defined engagement as “the harnessing of organization members’ selves to their work roles; in engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances”. According to Kahn, people with engagement are enabled to concomitantly express their preferred selves and completely satisfy their role requirements. Kahn suggests three direct psychological conditions of meaningfulness, psychological safety and psychological availability as influencing employees’ engagement (May et al., 2004; Rich et al.
Generally, there were various determinations for employee engagement have been developed from the first time of conceptualization, and such term is still being controversy for academic researchers as well as organizations. In the same year with Schaufeli’s UWES, Harter et al., had developed a conceptualization for employee engagement, using Gallup framework, as an “individual’s involvement and satisfaction with as well as enthusiasm for work” (Harter et al., 2002), which become one of the most cited pieces of practitioner literature (Liat Eldor, Eran Vigoda-Gadot, 2017). Saks argued to determine engagement as ‘a unique construct of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components… associated with individual role performance’ (Saks, 2006). In 2008, Macey and Schneider proposed a complicated taxonomy of 4 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com employee engagement, which, according to them, is viewed as “a desirable condition, has an organizational purpose, and connotes involvement, commitment, passion, enthusiasm, focused effort and energy, so it has both attitudinal and behavioral components”.
It is easy to see that almost the developed definitions for employee engagement are related to individual psychology or behavior. In fact, social aspect of engagement, which referred to the experience of connectedness with other people who could be colleagues but may be anyone that the work role provides an interface with (Kahn, 1990), was presented and acknowledged in scholars (Shuck and Wollard, 2010) (Soane et al. For example, Saks claimed that relationships with supervisors can be antecedents of engagement. (Saks, 2006; cited by Soane et al.
Notwithstanding, “yet social engagement had not been conceptualized or operationalized as a facet of engagement” (Soane et al., 2012) until Soane’s study, which determined employee engagement consists of 3 facets: Intellectual Engagement - the extent to which one is intellectually absorbed in work; Affective Engagement - the extent to which one experiences a state of positive affect relating to one’s work role; and Social Engagement - the extent to which one is socially connected with the working environment and shares common values with colleagues. (Soane et al. This paper, with the opinion of author that engagement requires both individual and social psychological, values and behavioral statements, will follow the definition of Soane et al., consider employee engagement as collect of 3 facets mentioned above. All of the term “employee engagement” from now can be understood this way.
Personal engagement Studies on engagement also have been conducted with several findings.