Abstract
The constant improvement of an enterprise’s competitive advantage is essential for its sustainable operation. Simultaneously, the persistent and effective learning methods of organizational members lead to the accumulation of learning results and knowledge, which are important intangible assets, as well as the key to establishing a company’s competitive advantage. Many enterprises have utilized various resources (such as building systems and purchasing software) to facilitate employee learning. However, the employees’ learning outcomes may not necessarily meet these enterprises’ expectations. As advocated in many studies, e-learning is not merely a new trend—it also plays an essential role in the learning and training process that organizational members undergo. However, throughout the learning process, what are the factors that cause different e-learning outcomes? The goal orientation theory in educational psychology has provided a reasonable framework for explaining and describing the differences in employees’ post-learning behaviors. This study focused on employees from Taiwanese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and their participation in enterprise resource planning (ERP)-based e-learning. The employees’ goal orientations and how they indirectly (with learning satisfaction as a mediator) impact the employees’ learning outcomes were examined and deduced. A questionnaire was administered to 405 employees from different SMEs who have had the experience of using an ERP-based e-learning platform. According to the structural equation model analysis results, the employees’ master goal orientation and performance-approach orientation (avoidance orientation) will exert an indirect positive (negative) influence on learning outcomes through learning satisfaction as a mediator. Lastly, this study interpreted the empirical results together with their academic and managerial implications, and proposed some recommendations for subsequent research.
Highlights
In the age of knowledge-based economies, enterprises are facing rapid changes in their operations and external environments, and they have begun to explore ways to create and maintain their competitive advantages in order to achieve the goal of operational sustainability
The aforementioned testing procedure yielded the following results: (1) Regarding the goal orientation scale, no items were removed from the mastery goal orientation subscale; three items were removed from the performance-approach goal orientation subscale; one item was removed from the performance-avoidance goal orientation subscale, leaving us with 14 items, from which three factors were extracted
Based on the goal orientation theory in educational psychology and past empirical studies, we first broke down the goal orientation of employees into the categories of mastery goal orientation, performance-approach goal orientation, and performance-avoidance goal orientation, after which we sought to deduce the impact of the employees’ goal orientation on their learning satisfaction and the relationship between goal orientation, learning satisfaction, and learning outcomes
Summary
In the age of knowledge-based economies, enterprises are facing rapid changes in their operations and external environments, and they have begun to explore ways to create and maintain their competitive advantages in order to achieve the goal of operational sustainability. Enterprises must transform to increase their organizational soft power. Peter Drucker [1] mentioned that in this new economic era, knowledge is the source of an enterprise’s competitive advantages, and its single most important resource. When facing volatile operating environments, organizations must, in order to avoid continuous losses in their competitive advantages, constantly learn new knowledge and develop new technologies, thereby increasing their competitiveness in the market. Organizational learning is beneficial for enterprise development and the maintenance of long-term competitive advantages and is achieved by each member of an organization [3,4]
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