THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRAINING PERCEPTION AND EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT: IMPACTS OF PERCEPTION OF REWARD AND SELF-EFFICACY

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


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. PROF. KODO YOKOZAWA

Hanoi, 2019


ACKOWLEDGEMENT
First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Tran Huy Phuong and
Assoc. Prof. 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


TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES
LIST OF TABLES
LIST OF ABBREVIATION
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................1

1.1. Research motivation ......................................................................................1
1.2. Research objectives .......................................................................................2
1.3. Research scope and objects ...........................................................................3
1.4. The structure of the paper ..............................................................................3
CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW ....................................................................4
2.1. Employee engagement ...................................................................................4
2.2. Employee training........................................................................................10
2.3. Self-efficacy.................................................................................................17
2.4. Reward .........................................................................................................21
2.5. Research questions ......................................................................................25
CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY ......................................................26
3.1. Research design ...........................................................................................26
3.2. Conceptual research model ..........................................................................27
Variables and measuring instruments ...............................................27
Training perception ...........................................................................27
Self-efficacy ......................................................................................28
Reward ...............................................................................................28


Employee engagement ......................................................................29
Conceptual research model ...............................................................30
3.3. Population, sample and data collection .......................................................31
Questionnaire design and administration ..........................................31
Population ..........................................................................................32
Sample and data collection process ...................................................32
3.4. Sample demographics ..................................................................................33
CHAPTER 4: DATA ANALYSIS ...........................................................................34
4.1. Data preparation ..........................................................................................34
4.2. Descriptive statistics ....................................................................................34
4.3. Reliability and validity ................................................................................36

4.3.1.

Reliability ..........................................................................................36

4.3.2.

Validity ..............................................................................................37

4.4. Pearson correlation ......................................................................................39
4.5. Regression analysis and hypotheses testing ................................................39
CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATION ...............................................46
5.1. Research findings ........................................................................................46
5.2. Contribution and implication .......................................................................50
5.3. Limitation and future research .....................................................................52
REFERENCES ..........................................................................................................54
APPENDIX ...............................................................................................................70


LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 2.1. Summary of antecedents and consequences of employee engagement..10
Figure 2.2. Training components and employee engagement model .......................15
Figure 2.3. Sources of Self-efficacy..........................................................................19
Figure 2.4. Engagement Diagnostic Tool: National Health Service .........................22
Figure 2.5. Total reward system ................................................................................23
Figure 3.1. Conceptual research model .....................................................................30
Figure 4.1. Statistical moderating model ..................................................................43


LIST OF TABLES
Table 3.1: Frequency of demographic information of respondents ..........................33

Table 4.1: Coding of variables ..................................................................................34
Table 4.2: Descriptive statistics of all variables .......................................................35
Table 4.3: Overall Cronbach’s alpha for each variable and sub-variable .................36
Table 4.4: Item-total statistics for Intrinsic reward variable .....................................37
Table 4.5: Rotated component matrix .......................................................................38
Table 4.6: Pearson correlation matrix .......................................................................39
Table 4.7: Regression analysis (Dependent variable: Employee Engagement) ......40
Table 4.8: Mediation analysis

(Dependent variable: Employee engagement;

Mediator: Self-efficacy) ............................................................................................42
Table 4.9: Moderation analysis .................................................................................44
Table 5.1: 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


CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
1.1.

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

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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.
1.2.

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

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to propose suggestions to improve the level of engagement for organizations in
Vietnam, hence enrich the outcomes and performance for those companies.
1.3.

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.
1.4.

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.

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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.
2.1.

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., 2010).
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

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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., 2012). For example, Saks claimed that relationships with
supervisors can be antecedents of engagement. (Saks, 2006; cited by Soane et al.,
2012). 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., 2012).
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. In 1990,
Kahn, with the purpose of exploring the conditions at work by which people
personally engage and disengage, had identified three psychological conditions meaningfulness, safety, and availability, which help explaining the variance in
people's bringing to and leaving out of themselves in their work role performances

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(Kahn, 1990). It is easy to see that Kahn at the beginning conceptualized engagement
around the psychological aspects of human beings. In 1992, Kahn proposed an
expansion in theoretical issue of his work. Such expansion delineates the concept of
psychological presence, its dimensions (attentiveness, connectedness, integration,
and focus), and their impact on personal engagement (Michelle R. Simpson, 2009).
At that time, Kahn theorizes some factors that preceding the psychological conditions
of meaningfulness, safety, and availability, consists of various work elements, social
systems, and individual distractions. Beside that conceptualization, his findings
suggested that outcomes of personal engagement may include performance quality
and productivity. It means, when an individual finds his job meaningful, feels safe,
and has the essential resources in their work role both externally and internally,
personal engagement will be led to, and the individual is stated to be ‘‘fully present’’
(Kahn, 1992). In 2004, May et al., based on Kahn’s studies, conducted a research that
proposed an individual engagement model at work. Such research investigated in
Kahn’s three psychological conditions, as well as put in various determinants of
personal engagement such as job enrichment, relations, self-consciousness, activities
or resources (May et al., 2004; Michelle R. Simpson, 2009).
Burnout/Engagement
Follow another school of engagement, Maslach and Leiter in their study which aimed
at examining how the six areas of work life and the three dimensions of
burnout/engagement affect the perception of employee about the change within
organization, found that there were a mediating effect of burnout/engagement that
linked organizational context and organizational changes (Maslach and Leiter, 1997).
After that, several academic studies were built upon Maslach and Leiter’s finding,
resulted in drives and consequences of engagement. For instance, Laschinger and
Finegan proposed three models suggest empowerment has indirect effects on
burnout/work engagement through various areas of work life. (Laschinger et al.,

2005; Michelle R. Simpson, 2009). One year later, burnout had been found that has
partially mediating effect on the relationship between work life and adverse events.
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Whereby, a working environment which enabled higher support for professional
practice, would lead to greater engagement (Leiter and Laschinger, 2006).
Work engagement
Schaufeli et al., with the definition of engagement consist of 3 components: vigor,
dedication and absorption, in which vigor and dedication are two opposite
components to burnout dimension (emotional exhaustion and cynicism), developed
the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale in 2003, and used it to test the relationship
between job resources, engagement and turnover intention. The result suggested that
work engagement mediated the link between job resources and turnover intention
(Schaufeli et al., 2002, 2003, 2004). Moreover, since the measurement tool UWES
were developed, “a growing body of research focusing on this construct has evolved”
(Michelle R. Simpson, 2009). Simpson in his research stated that a number of studies
emphasized at the antecedents and/or consequences of work engagement, in which,
the organizational factors were illustrated that having a vital influence in predicting
work engagement, but not individual factors. One of the illustrations is the result of
several studies, which pointed out that job resources significantly predicted work
engagement (Hakenen et al., 2006; Llorens et al., 2006; Mauno et al., 2007; Schaufeli
and Bakker, 2004; Xanthopoulou et al., 2007). Likewise, researchers found that
employees who have higher level of control, reward, values, or better work life
experience would be more engaged to work (Koyuncu, 2006).
Additionally, previous empirical studies also indicated that the turnover intention,
organizational commitment, service climate and customer loyalty were the potential
consequences of work engagement (Schaufeli and Bakker, 2004; Hakenen et al.,
2006; Richardsen et al., 2006; Salanova et al., 2005). Besides, the demonstration of
the mediating effect of work engagement for the relationship between job resources

(career opportunities, supervisor coaching, role-clarity, and autonomy) and the
organizational outcomes were found in several studies (Michelle R. Simpson, 2009).

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Employee engagement
When it comes to employee engagement, with the own developed definition, Harter
had investigated engagement that way and generalized relationship were found
between unit-level employee satisfaction-engagement and the 5 organizational
outcomes: profitability, productivity, customer satisfaction, employee safety,
turnover. Self-efficacy, organizational-based self-esteem, and optimism mediate the
relationship between job resources and work engagement and exhaustion, and
influence the perception of job resources (Xanthopoulou, 2007).
More recently, in a study which aimed at testing the influence of employee
engagement to the discretionary effort and turnover intention, the result showed that
three conditions developed by Kahn in 1990 and 1992 which are meaningfulness,
safety and availability engagement, have no significant impact on discretionary effort,
but two of them (meaningfulness and availability) negatively affect to employee
turnover intention, in the constraints of controlled job fit, affective commitment and
psychological climate (Shuck et al., 2011). 3 year later, a research using UWES-9 –
a transformation of UWES as measurement for employee work engagement, stated
that learning opportunity, coworker support, and supervisor support have a positive
effect on work engagement (Sarti, 2014). However, there were no indication with the
same result for other aspects of job resources, such as financial reward or performance
feedback, which had been tested together with above 3 variables in his paper. Besides,
leadership were one of the organizational conditions which had been exploited in the
relationship with engagement. Different styles of leadership brought different effects
on employee engagement. While servant leadership had slight effect on employee
engagement, transformational leadership style created a more essential impact.

Otherwise, transactional leadership were suggested that should be transformed, in
order to gather a suitable environment which can facilitate higher level of engagement
behavior (Shuck and Herd, 2012; De Clercq et al., 2014). (Shuck et al., 2014)
explored the mediating effect of employee engagement on the relationship between
perceived support for participation in HRD practices and intention to turnover and
8


found that employee engagement and its components, such as cognitive, emotional,
behavioral engagement, have partial mediating effects.
Empirically, Saks in 2006 proposed a model of antecedents and consequences of
employee engagement. In that model, employee engagement was categorized into 2
aspects: job engagement and organizational engagement. According to Saks,
antecedents of engagement include job characteristics, perceived organizational
support, perceived supervisor support, rewards and recognition, procedural justice,
distributive justice; and its consequences consist of job satisfaction, organizational
commitment, intention to quit, and OCB. However, the results of his study showed
the effects will depends on which variables of antecedents and consequences, and
which types of engagement among 2 types above. It means that there will be a
significant meaning by categorizing employee engagement.
Figure 2.1 shows the antecedents and consequences of employee engagement which
were synthesized from selected previous related studies. Accordingly, job resources
including learning chance, coworker support, and supervisor support, perceived
support for participation in HRD practices, servant and transformational leadership,
training perception, colleague’s incivility and work meanings were determined as the
antecedents of engagement (Lee et al., 2017). In which, transformational leadership
had the highest frequency of appearance in academic studies about the antecedents of
employee engagement. More generally, most of leadership styles have been
researched as preceding factors of engagement in conceptual studies, while servant
leadership has been found in the result of empirical papers. Goal congruence and

social interaction also had been studied as engagement precursory but researchers
found that there was no strong impact of them on the research object. Otherwise,
consequences which are led to by engagement consist of working behavior, turnover
rate, knowledge creation, several organizational outcomes such as working
performance and benefit, organizational citizenship behavior, in which employee
performance improvement were emphasized, as an ultimate purpose for studying and
implementing employee engagement. Thus, it is suggested that engagement will
9


strongly positively drive working performance of employees in order to reach greater
organizational outcomes.
Antecedents

Consequences

Job resources

Work role behavior

Perceived support for

Turnover intention

participation in HRD

Organizational knowledge

practices
Training perception

Servant leadership

creation
EMPLOYEE

Outcome variables (in-role

ENGAGEMENT

Transformational leadership

performance, turnover
intentions, OCB)

Incivility

Organizational citizenship

Meaningful work

behavior (OCB)

Goal congruence

Discretionary effort

Social interaction

Perceptions of HRD practices

Figure 2.1. Summary of antecedents and consequences of employee engagement
(Source: Lee et al., 2017)
Hence, it can be said that which figure 1 show express not only the support for the
work of Saks, but also the contribution for the problem of antecedents and
consequences of employee engagement, through effort of several academic
researchers.
2.2.

Employee training

Training from long time ago has been viewed as a completely essential aspects in
making the organization profitable. Landy gave out a definition that job training is “a
set of planned activities on the part of an organization to increase the job knowledge
and skills or to modify the attitudes and social behavior of its members in ways
consistent with the goals of the organization and the requirements of the job” (Landy,

10


1985). Michel Armstrong in another definition, said that “Training is systematic
development of the knowledge, skills and attitudes required by an individual to
perform adequately a given task or job” (Armstrong, 2001). More recently, Ross
Holland (2012) has stated that training is “any planned activity to transfer or modify
knowledge, skills, and attitude through learning experiences. Personnel may require
training for variety of reasons, including the need to maintain levels of competence
and respond to the demand of changing circumstances and new approaches and
technologies”. Training primarily linked to the improvement and upgradation of the
skills and knowledge of the employees and focuses on employee behavior at large to
improve current and future state of job performance (Malik et al., 2013).
In this study, the perception of employee satisfaction on the training activity that they

participate in at the workplace will be considered as an independent variable and be
investigated to find out its correlations with other variables. Schmidt in his work
combined the two definitions of employee training (Landy, 1985; Patrick, 2000) and
employee job satisfaction (Spector, 1997) into a term “job training satisfaction”,
which is defined by himself as how people perceive about the job training they receive
(Schmidt, 2007). Conducted researches also showed related result about training
perception. For example, a favorable relationship between employee work training
and their commitment with the company. Accordingly, HRD should “adapt new
research methods to demonstrate to organizational decision makers that training and
development contributes to desired workplace attitudes… which may in turn
influence behaviors such as absenteeism and turnover” (Bartlett, 2001; cited by
Schmidt, 2007). In the study of training for new employees, Tannenbaum et al (1991)
stated that positive or negative attitudes and impressions which employees may have
will depends strongly on their job training at workplace. Schmidt in his work also
cited suggestion that “a large part of the worker’s sense of job satisfaction can be
attributed to workplace learning opportunities” (Rowden and Conine, 2003). Finally,
he found that employee satisfaction about job training highly correlated to overall job
satisfaction with the scope of employees was working in customer contact positions.

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Besides, he recommended that this correlation is proper among variety of
occupational fields.
Employees minds and behavior within organizations are under a considerable impact
of their perception on training (Mohammed, 2017). Beforehand, there was a notation
that more positively employees perceive training activities in their workplace, more
greatly they achieve the level of motivating effect for taking training (Ahmad and
Bakar, 2003). In the same work they said that the investment which organization put
in training will facilitate them to get higher level of commitment from their

employees. It is considered as one of the most vital individual perceptions which
influence to attitudes and behaviors (Guest, 2002). The success of training activities
will strongly depend upon not just employee’s individual personality but also their
perception about its benefits or outcomes (Burke and Hutchins, 2007). Additionally,
employee perception about training was suggested to be varied by different ways due
to the differences in experience and thoughts about its purposes (Nishi, Lepak, and
Schneider, 2008). There has academical demonstration indicated that such perception
has considerable impacts on productivity, performance and level of engagement (Paul
et al., 2003; Kuvass et al., 2009; Salanova, 2005).
Particularly, employee training is studied and referred as a vital part of HR practices
for creating improvement for work and organizational outcomes and employee
behavior. There are several papers studied the impacts of training on the performance
of the employees. A study in 2013 examined the influence of training on performance
and presented that “organizational performance is significantly determined by
training imparted to the employees”. Accordingly, training is an important antecedent
of performance (Zahid, 2013). In the same year, Nassazi conducted a study about the
impact of training on employee performance in a Uganda telecommunication
company. The results reported that training and development have an impact on the
performance of employees with regards to their jobs (Nassazi, 2013). There were also
positive attitudes had been found towards the influence of training to the employees
working performance, despite some constraints which control some of the effects of
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the training activities (Mohammed Al-Mzary et al., 2015). The similar effect was also
indicated by works of several other researchers, that training significantly positively
drives employee performance (Elnaga et al., 2013; Aragón, 2014; Amadi, 2014).
Besides, training has been found that it affects employee satisfaction. Chepkosgey et
al., proposed a framework of relationship between various types of training program
and employee satisfaction and working attitude. His work found out that “training

had a great impact on the job satisfaction and retention of the employees” and “is
essential in keeping employees apt in their work so that they can gain satisfaction
from it.” (Chepkosgey et al., 2015). Training has strongly positively influenced to
employee job satisfaction (Taormina, 1999; Garcia, 2005). This statement also was
supported by work of Okechukwu, which proved the hypothesis that the relationship
between training and employee satisfaction was clearly illustrated (Okechukwu,
2017). Additionally, paper of Truitt indicated a significant support for the hypothesis
that “adequate job training is related to positive attitudes about job proficiency and
that having adequate job training is related to positive attitudes about job training”
Training and its positive effects on employee attitude and proficiencies create longlasting stakeholders and could serve as the binding force for business success during
trouble times (Truitt, 2011).
Although there has number of researches investigated components of human
resources management practices, and its connection with level of engagement of
employees, few studies have been found which studied direct influences of individual
HR functions, to such important concept (Suan, 2014; Salanova, 2005; cited by
Ahmed, 2015). According to Ahmed et al. (2015), employee training is empirically
found prominent in influencing turnover intentions, organizational citizenship
behavior (Skarlicki, 1997), commitment and motivation (Sahinidis, 2008),
performance (Frayne, 2000; Palmen, 2013), post-training organizational commitment,
job satisfaction (Schmidt, 2007). Demerouti et al. (2010) emphasized that training
helped the employees to modify their behaviors, emotions to enhance their skills and
competencies. It is related to engagement. Simultaneously, employee training has

13


also been empirically tested with employee engagement, but mainly just as part of
HRM practices and not so direct (Ahmed et al., 2015). Salanova (2005) has found
that organizational resources, including training factor, had strong impacts on
employee engagement. In another research, Luthan (2010) found that training

intervention significantly increased both the level of performance and psychological
capital, which consists of engagement behavior.
Employee training and employee engagement
There are few previous studies empirically investigated directly in the relationship
between employee training and employee engagement. In the research which
exploring engagement behavior among more than hundred employees in a Malaysian
hotel, the result has shown a strong influence to the engagement level resulted from
training activities (Salanova et al., 2006). With the same concept, it is suggested that
work engagement can be enhanced through improving on the service trainings
provided (Suan et al, 2014). In 2015, Fletcher, in order to explore the mediating
effects of both personal role engagement and work engagement on the relationship
between training perceptions and work role behaviors, and compare the degrees of
two engagements. His finding showed that personal role engagement has a stronger
effect on the relationship between training perceptions and task proficiency as well
as training perceptions and task adaptability. However, there is no difference between
the mediating effects of the two engagements on the relationship between training
perceptions and task proactivity (Fletcher, 2015). Training could predict employee
engagement through its content and benefit that employees perceived. It was able to
be concluded that the essential relationship which connect training and engagement
has been highlighted in some of the previous human resources management (HRM)
related studies. In other words, training activities may help organization to enhance
the level of engagement at work. Study of Ahmed et al., investigated the link between
training and engagement, and proposed a model which indicates such relationship. In
that model training variable was categorized into 4 components including need
assessment, training design, trainer and delivery, and evaluation. By conceptually
14


conducting, he found that all of the components have positive relations with posttraining employee engagement and thus concluded that “employee training will be
positively related with post-training employee engagement” (Ahmed et al., 2015).

Training Components

Need Assessment

Training Design
Post-Training
Employee Engagement
Training Components

Evaluation

Figure 2.2. Training components and employee engagement model
(Source: Ahmed et al., 2015)
Although there were number of studies investigated employee training and its
relationship with employee engagement from the past which indicated the positive
impact, recent researches, however, released some inconsistent results. Semwal et al.
(2017) conducted study from a sample of 127 employees in IT companies and
indicated that training vitally contribute to all components of engagement.
Notwithstanding, in the effort to find the impact of training and development on
engagement from Pakistani banking sector, Ezam et al., (2018) failed to reject the
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hypothesis that “training has no significant impact on employees’ engagement”. In
other words, training which employees received might not gather high level of
employee engagement (Ezam et al., 2018). Such results seem to be associated with
the report results provided by Gallup and SHRM mentioned in the first Chapter.
Gap analysis
As mentioned above, the results of recent studies about such relationship were

inconsistent. Not just that, several newspaper articles and reports by different
organizations has indicated the weak connection between training and employee
engagement. The inconsistency in the results may be caused by different contexts of
sample, or different in working fields to be more specific. Together with studies have
been reviewed in the previous sections, it is indicated that the results are limited in
terms of generalizability. In other words, there is a gap in literature since studies
mainly focused on single working field or single country. Therefore, the findings of
this paper may propose a different view on employee engagement in the context of
Vietnam. Besides, although there has papers which conduct the link between training
and engagement, there were very few studies which investigate training as a single
individual function, but as a component of HRD have been found. Consequently, the
result of relationship between those two variables may be affected by employees’
perception on other HRD components. Another possible reason of this inconsistency
is that the relationship between employee training and employee engagement may be
affected by some other relating factors. Base on above assumptions, there are two
other variables have been introduced in this paper, with the purposes of testing their
different effects on the link between training and engagement. Specifically, selfefficacy and reward will be tested whether they have mediating effect and moderating
effect respectively on such relationship. Since the results found by academic
researchers and organizations have conflicted themselves, there might a suggestion
that different context will illustrate different influences to the research objects as well
as the results. Consequently, at first the link between employee training and employee

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engagement will be tested in this paper, in order to explore their relationship within
Vietnamese workplace.
H1: Employee training positively influence employee engagement.
2.3.

Self-efficacy

Definition of self-efficacy is given by Bandura (1977), which considered self-efficacy
as the belief of individuals in their ability to perform a given task and to meet
situational demands. According to Bergh and Theron (1999) cited in Stadler and
Kotze (2006), self-efficacy determines whether a person will pursue a specific goal
and how much effort will be put into attaining the stated objective.
Self-efficacy has three dimensions: magnitude, the level of task difficulty a person
believes she can attain; strength, the conviction regarding magnitude as strong or
weak; and generality, the degree to which the expectation is generalized across
situations (Fred C. Lunenburg, 2011). The higher the level of self-efficacy, the more
likely the individual will be motivated to persevere in attaining the objective, even if
there are obstacles impeding him/her. An employee’s sense of capability influences
his perception, motivation, and performance (Bandura, 1997).
Bandura pointed out three ways that self-efficacy can influences learning and
performance. First, it has impacts on the employees’ goals selection in working,
which might be at low level if they have low self-efficacy, and reversely. Besides,
self-efficacy affects employees’ learning behavior and their endeavors they put into
the job. Thirdly, employee perseverance in attempting and adapting to new or
troublesome missions is also influenced by their perception of self-efficacy. The
higher level of self-efficacy, the more confident they are in perceiving and practically
performing and tasks. Thus, they will be more persistent in solving the difficulties
(Bandura, 1982). All there effects above may significantly drive the quality of
performance of employees.

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Due to the importance of self-efficacy at work, it is essential to determine what lead
to it. In 1997, Bandura proposed a model of sources of self-efficacy. Accordingly,

there are four key factors that result in individual self-efficacy, including:
Past performance – the most important source which may provide employees the
confidence. It is assumed that workers who have been successful in their previous
job-related work will be more likely to have high self-efficacy.
Vicarious experience – this supposed that one’s self-efficacy can be generated by
seeing other person or co-worker’s success in doing tasks. It is suggested that this
source will work best when ones see others who have similar attributes,
characteristics or abilities.
Verbal persuasion – employees’ level of self-efficacy might be increase by
persuading them that they have great qualification to complete the tasks, based on the
Pygmalion effect, the phenomenon whereby expectation of people can influence the
performance of a particular person. Studies showed that employees may perform
more greatly when their supervisors or managers believe that they can do successfully.
However, the effectiveness of this source may be varied depends on various
conditions (Lunenburg, 2011).
Emotional cues – Bandura argued that if employee find something not suitable in his
task, or expect failure, will be likely to get some physiological symptoms. Such
symptoms may different depending on individuals, but normally they will lead to low
outcomes.

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