Abstract
This study investigates the relation of further training and employees’ affective commitment by disentangling the relevance of a firm’s general support for further training and the individual’s actual participation. Using linked employer-employee data, we consider both the firm’s and the individual’s perspective and control for several HR instruments additionally to the usual demographics and job characteristics. We also distinguish between subgroups of employees regarding age and schooling. Results show that employees’ participation in further training and a firm’s support for further training are both positively related to affective commitment. Furthermore, our results hint for differences in employees’ expectations regarding the amount of the firm’s support for further training. Whereas there is no meaningful relation of the general firm’s support for further training to commitment of university graduates, participation in further training measures and the individuals’ perceived support for personnel development is particularly relevant for this group of employees.
Highlights
We start our empirical analysis by examining the relation of participation in further training and affective commitment
The structure of the data allows us to control for a bundle of human resource management instruments that can be related to individual affective commitment and which have not been considered in previous work
We find that participation in further training and a firm’s support for further training are both significantly positively related to affective commitment of employees in separate analyses
Summary
Previous studies look at single facets of further training: Some contributions rely on employees’ perceptions of a firm’s support toward training measures and mostly find a positive link to their affective commitment (Meyer and Smith 2000; Bartlett 2001; Ahmad and Bakar 2003; Lee and Bruvold 2003; Bartlett and Kang 2004; AlEmadi and Marquardt 2007; Bulut and Culha 2010; Ling et al 2014; Bashir and Long 2015; Kooij and Boon 2018). Some contributions take the firm’s perspective into account and study the link between the general provision of training by the firm and employees’ commitment (Wentland 2003; Chew and Chan 2008)
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