An Exploratory Study of Training Transfer Climate in India

The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent of training transfer climate prevailing in Indian organizations and find out the differences in the perception of employees based on organizational and respondents’ characteristics. The data collected from 2,778 employees working in 70 different organizations across India using a survey questionnaire formed the basis for analysis. The study found that the overall training transfer climate prevailing in India was moderate, leaving a room for improvement, particularly in the areas, supervisor sanctions and positive personal outcomes when learning is transferred on the job. It further found that the companies in the service sector, privately owned joint ventures, Indian multinational companies and small organizations could do better in creating transfer climate than their counterparts. Further, it was found that the higher the levels of education, the higher the perception of transfer climate. Also, the higher the experience, the higher the perception of transfer climate.


Introduction
Nowadays, organizations are attempting to capitalize on training initiatives to move their strategic agendas forward.These initiatives require that the individuals participating in training take new knowledge back to the workplace and apply what they have learned (John-Paul Hatala & Fleming, 2007).One of the major factors that affect application of learning on the job is the work environment (Baldwin & Ford, 1988).The transfer climate is a mediating variable in the relationship between the organisational environment and an individual's attitude toward the job, as well as behavior on the job (Holton, Bates, Seyler, & Carvalho, 1997).Even when learning occurs during training, the transfer climate may either support or inhibit its application on the job (Mathieu, Tannenbaum, & Salas, 1992).An organization's training climate is instrumental in preparing individuals for formal development activities and achieving the desired learning objectives (Tracey, Hinkin, Tannenbaum, & Mathieu, 2001).A more positive workplace transfer climate shows stronger operational results (Hoekstra, 2003).This paper makes an attempt to assess the training transfer climate in different organizations across India and thereby find out the differences based on organizational and respondents' characteristics.

Measuring Transfer Climate
The transfer climate (perceived) refers to characteristics of the work environment that may facilitate or inhibit the use of trained skills (Burke & Baldwin, 1999).Differing from the general work environment, training transfer climate is specifically and intentionally directed at the transfer of training.Rouiller and Goldstein (1993) analyzed the concept of transfer climate by conducting an empirical study that evaluated the relationship between climate and post-training behavioral change.According to them, transfer climate consists of those situations and consequences that either inhibit or facilitate the transfer of what has been learned in training into the job situation.They identified four types of situation cues such as goal cues, social cues, task cues, self-control cues, and another four types of consequence cues such as positive feedback, negative feedback, punishment and no feedback.Using these cues, Rouiller and Goldstein (1993) conducted a study on management trainees working in a fast-food restaurant.This study demonstrated that aggregated unit-level perceptions are added significantly to the variance in post-training job performance.However, this study could not validate the factor structure of transfer climate because the sample size was inadequate.Hence Tracy, Tannenbaum, and Kavanaugh (1995) made attempts to expand on Rouiller and Goldstein (1993) using items drawn from their instruments, as well as an additional dimension termed 'continuous-learning'.Baldwin and Ford (1988) and Wexley and Lathan (1991) suggested that 'opportunity to perform' is an important transfer climate construct.The research done on this construct indicated that opportunity to perform reflects on factors that are organizational, individual, and contextual.
Reviewing all the attempts made to study training transfer climate, Holton, Bates, Seyler, and Carvalho (1997) pointed out that despite general acknowledgement of the difficulty in transferring learning, no validated and generally accepted instrument for assessing transfer climate exits to measure factors were found to affect organizations.Hence they created an instrument and carried out a study on operating technicians of a petrochemical company, and validated the instrument.Their analysis suggested the following transfer climate constructs:  Supervisory support: It refers to the extent to which supervisors reinforce and support use of learning on the job.


Opportunity to use: It is the extent to which trainees are provided with resources and tasks that enable them to transfer their new skills on the job.


Peer support: It measures the extent to which peers support the application of learning on the job.


Supervisor sanctions: They refer to the negative responses of the supervisors, if training is not used on the job.


Personal outcomes-positive: They refer to the degree to which the application of training on the job leads to positive outcomes or payoffs for the individual.


Personal outcomes-negative: They refer to the degree to which the application of training on the job leads to negative outcomes for the individuals.


Resistance: It refers to the extent to which the prevailing group norms are perceived to discourage use of new skills.
Using these variables, Holton, Bates, and Ruona (2000) created the Learning Transfer System Inventory (LTSI) which was designed to assess "all factors in the person, training, and organization that influence the transfer of learning to job performance".Tracey and Tews (2005) observed that the operationalization of the LTSI is based on individual perceptions of the transfer system.They further observed that Holton and his colleagues were not explicit about the appropriate level of analysis for their climate construct.The transfer climate component of the LTSI is akin to a psychological climate, rather than a shared or consensus-based phenomenon.Therefore, they created a general training transfer climate scale (GTCS) and validated it.There are three major dimensions in this scale.The first dimension is managerial support, which reflects the extent to which supervisors and managers encourage on-the job learning, innovation, and skill acquisition and provide recognition to employees in support of these activities.The second dimension is job support, which represents the degree to which jobs are designed to promote continuous learning and provide flexibility for acquiring new knowledge and skills.The final dimension is organizational support, which corresponds to policies, procedures, and practices that demonstrate the importance of training and development efforts, such as reward systems and resources to acquire and apply learned skills.
John-Paul Hatala, and Fleming (2007) identified Social Network Analysis (SNA) as a methodology for analyzing the transfer climate prior to training.SNA serves as a tool for analyzing a participant's organizational network relationship prior to training, to help the facilitator, trainee, and supervisor gain an accurate picture of the transfer climate.Based on this analysis, measures can be taken to develop strategies to deal with the relational barriers prior to training that will facilitate the participant's transfer of learning back to the work environment.

The Setting of the Present Study
This study was conducted in India, which is being considered as an emerging talent powerhouse, predicted to be among the world's five largest economies and viewed by investors, businesses, and tertiary education providers as a land of opportunities (Budhwar & Varma, 2011;Pio, 2007;Rao & Varghese, 2009).Human Resource Development (HRD) activities at macro-level in India are initiated by the central and state governments for shaping basic, formal and informal education.Micro-level HRD initiatives come from different corporate organizations across India.Over a period of time, training and development, as a subsystem of HRD, has evolved and matured to a substantial degree in India (Rao, Rao, & Yadav, 2001) in corporate companies.India made a significant progress with regard to increased training budgets, application of technology in training, strategic linkage of training, rapid changes in training delivery, and systematic needs assessment (Srimannarayana, 2006).The training function is predominately structured as an integral part of the human resource department, though some organizations have separate training departments with one training staff member for every 250 employees.Although each organization keeps an eye on more than one method to assess the training needs of employees, the popular methods of needs assessment are performance appraisal and business goals of the organizations (Srimannarayana, 2010).With respect to measuring training effectiveness, traditional measures such as feedback of the participants on the training programs, number of employees trained, training costs, and number of training days are the more popular measures of training, than the impact measures such as transfer of training, performance improvements, and cost benefit analysis (Srimannarayana, 2011).

The Methodology
This study aimed at examining the extent of training transfer climate prevailing in various types of organizations in India.It also made an attempt to find out the difference in transfer climate in the organizations based on their characteristics and the characteristics of employees of the organizations.A questionnaire was developed on training transfer climate replicating the validated instrument of Holton et al. (1997) because transfer climate is an outcome similar to psychological climate, rather than a shared or consensus-based phenomenon.The questionnaire covered questions relating to supervisory support, opportunity to use, peer support, supervisor sanctions, personal outcomes-positive, personal outcome-negative, and resistance.The latter part of the questionnaire consisted of questions relating to the information about the organization such as its nature of business, ownership, geographical orientation, and size of the organization, as well as respondents' details such as their position, experience, gender, and qualification.The questionnaire was administered on 3000 employees working in 70 organizations across India representing different types of business and ownership-based convenience sampling method consisting of 2,778 usable filled-in questionnaires which were received from these organisations.This data formed the basis for analysis.The data was analyzed quantitatively using mean scores, Pearson's coefficient of correlation tests, MANOVA and Tukey's tests.

The Organizational Information
As presented in table 1, the organizations were distributed to manufacturing (33%), service (36%) and IT (31%) sectors.Ownership-wise, three-fourths of the organizations were privately owned companies, 13% were public companies, and 15% were joint ventures.As far as their geographical orientation is concerned, 39% of them were foreign multinational companies, 21% were Indian multinationals and the remaining 21% were local Indian companies.With respect to organizational size, 20% were small companies which employed less than 500; 36% were medium sized companies with an employee strength ranging from 500 to 1000; and 44% were large ones which employed more than 1000.All organizations established training and development departments.61% of the companies constituted training departments as an integral part of their HR department.Training department was an independent department in the remaining 39% of the companies.

Respondents' Profile
It can be seen from table 2 that the respondents of the study were distributed into managerial (29.84%), supervisory (50.94%) and associate (19.22%) cadres.As far as their work experience is concerned, 20.95% of them had less than five years of experience; 40.17% of them had less than 10 years of experience; and the remaining 38.88% had more than 10 years of experience.Gender-wise, almost 30% of the respondents were female.In terms of qualification, 47.08% had post-graduate qualification, while another 47.23% were graduates and the remaining (5.69%) respondents had an education level of less than graduation.Nature of business-wise, the respondents of the study were distributed to manufacturing (31.61%), service (37.08%) and IT (31.32%) sectors.Ownership-wise, nearly three-fourths (72.93%) of the respondents belonged to privately owned organizations, while the rest were evenly divided between publicly owned and private joint ventures.As far as geographical orientation is concerned, 23.15% of the respondents belonged to local Indian companies, while the rest of the sample was more or less evenly distributed between Indian and foreign multinational companies.In terms of size, 20.52% of the respondents worked for small units with a headcount of less than 500, while 35.21% of them worked in medium-sized companies with a headcount of 500 to 1,000 and the rest 44.28% belonged to large companies, which employed more than 1,000 employees.

The Results and Discussion
The grand mean score of overall transfer climate is calculated as 3.17.In the questionnaire the rating of 3 referred to 'sometimes true'.In such a context the transfer climate in India can be deemed moderate.When looked at individual items, as shown in table 3, there were 12 items that differed significantly (more than one standard deviation) from the grand mean.Seven of these were rated significantly higher while five were rated significantly lower.However, four out of the five lowly rated items were part of negative constructs and consequently their lower ratings supported a better transfer climate.All the seven highly rated items belonged to positive constructs and thus their high ratings supported a better transfer climate.The lone item whose ratings went against a better transfer climate was: 'employees who successfully use their training are likely to receive a salary increase' which was significantly lowly rated.The strong items were: 'supervisors support the use of techniques learned in training that employees bring back to their jobs' and 'when employees arrive from training, supervisors encourage them to share what they have learned with other employees.

1 Overall Training Transfer Climate and Organizational and Respondents' Factors
As shown in table 4, in terms of nature of business, it was the service sector which took the top position in transfer climate score when compared to manufacturing and IT sectors.The reason might be that the service organizations that deal with customers directly are more concerned of the proper delivery of services.They give appropriate training on customer service skills and expect the employees to apply the new skills by providing proper transfer climate.Organizational ownership-wise, it was the privately owned joint ventures, which had a better transfer climate than others with an average of 3.31.With an average score of 3.21, Indian multinational companies were better than foreign multinational companies as well as local Indian companies.With regard to organizational size, small organization with less than 500 employees had a slightly better transfer climate than others with an average of 3.20.The smaller size of the organization might keep the process of creating training transfer climate within manageable limits and the companies might be very particular about implementing newly learned skills on the job.It is significant to note that, the respondents of the organizations which created training department as an integral part of HR division, had better perception of transfer climate than the respondents of the organizations which established separate training departments.This indicates that the creation of an exclusive training department might not ensure better training transfer.With regard to differences of perception of transfer climate based on the gender, with an average of 3.13, the perception of transfer climate was slightly lower for the female respondents than the male respondents.This might be because of the relatively higher expectations of female employees on organizational support for training transfer.Looking at educational qualifications, it can be said that the perception of transfer climate improved with the level of education.The average increased from 2.87 for people who did not have a graduate level education to 3.20 for people with post-graduate level education.A similar trend was observed in case of experience too.People with higher experience had slightly better perception of transfer climate in their organization than people with less experience.These findings indicate that the perception of training transfer climate depends on the maturity levels of employees in terms of their qualifications and experience.

Construct-Wise Analysis
Construct-wise, as indicated in Table 5, peer support secured first place.This is because colleagues help the employees in applying new skills.They also help their colleagues for setting goals to use learning.The construct, supervisory support, received the second place indicating supervisors help and encourage employees to apply newly learned skills, but not to the extent of peer support.This argument might be supported by the score (2.94) of the construct of supervisory sanctions.Overall, it can be observed that none of the positive constructs reached close to the 4 point mark on a 5 point scale while both the negative constructs crossed the halfway mark, indicating that transfer climate in India is still not good.There is an apparent conflict with individuals receiving both strong encouragement as well as discouragement while implementing learning from training programs.A mean of 2.75 on the negative personal outcomes suggest that there isn't just a lack of policies to encourage individuals to implement what they learnt in training.The environment actually discourages individuals from doing so.However, a stronger mean of 2.89 on positive personal outcomes suggests encouraging conditions for the same.

Correlation between Constructs
As indicated in Table 6, with a Pearson's Coefficient of 0.73, a strong association between two negative constructs such as personal outcomes-negative and resistance was observed.A similar correlation existed between positive constructs of transfer climate too.There is a strong association between supervisor support and peer support (0.64), between supervisor support and opportunity to use (0.61), and between peer support and opportunity to use (0.48).These findings confirm that various constructs of transfer climate are supporting one another strongly.

Transfer Climate Constructs and Organizational Factors
MANOVA and Tukey's were used to determine the association between organizational factors and transfer climate constructs.The data were presented in Table 7 and the results are as follows: 5.4.1 Nature of Business Significant differences based on nature of business were observed for the average ratings of five constructs such as opportunity to use, peer support, personal outcomes-positive, personal outcomes-negative and resistance.IT industry scored significantly better than the services industry on two positive constructs, i.e. opportunity to use and personal outcomes-positive.This might be because of training on technology use in the IT sector.When the IT professionals were given training on technology to complete a project, they had to apply the skills learned using the similar technology to complete the project.Subsequent to this, when training and its application on the job are effective, positive outcomes are natural to emerge.No significant differences were observed for supervisor support and supervisor sanctions.The service sector received the highest score on peer support.With regard to two negative constructs, i.e. personal-outcomes-negative and resistance, also it was the services sector which scored higher than the manufacturing sector.It is significant to note here that even though there are some negative situations and consequences in the service sector, the overall perception of training transfer climate is higher in service sector.

Ownership
Significant differences based on ownership were observed for the average ratings of six constructs.The only construct where no significant differences were observed was personal outcomes-positive.It is interesting to note that joint ventures fared well in all four positive constructs, namely supervisor support, opportunity to use, peer support, and supervisor sanctions.This is consistent with the perception of overall training transfer climate.For each of the other four positive constructs, publicly owned organizations fared worse than private organizations.
In the same vein publicly owned organizations garnered significantly high ratings than private organizations for the two negative constructs, namely, resistance and personal outcomes-negative.These findings clearly indicate the need for improvement in transfer climate in public sector companies.

Geographical Orientation
In terms of geographical orientation of the organizations, significant differences were observed for the average ratings of opportunity to use, personal outcomes-positive and resistance.Indian multinational companies fared significantly better than both local Indian companies and foreign multinational companies when it came to opportunity to use.They also had significantly lower resistance than the other two categories.It is interesting to note that, in case of personal outcomes-positive, it was the local Indian companies which fared significantly better than the multinational companies, both foreign and Indian.Consistent with the overall transfer climate perception, Indian multinational companies secured better than their counterparts.

Size of the Organization
Significant differences based on size of the organization were observed for all seven constructs.While large organizations fared significantly better than medium-sized organizations in case of supervisor support, in case of opportunity to use and personal outcomes-positive, medium-sized organizations fared better than both large and small organizations.In case of peer support and supervisor sanctions, it was the small organizations which fared better than both medium and large organizations.On the two negative constructs i.e. resistance and personal outcomes-negative, large organizations were significantly higher than the smaller ones.These findings reveal that the higher scores on the negative constructs in large organizations led to the lower score of overall training transfer perception when compared to small organizations.
Table 7. Correlation between transfer climate construct and organizational factors climate depends on the maturity levels of employees because this study found that the higher the levels of education, the higher the perception of transfer climate; and, the higher the experience, the higher the perception of transfer climate.
The overall transfer climate analysis leads to the conclusion that the training transfer climate prevailing in India seems to be moderate.(Rao, 2008).Transferring training inputs on the job is not carried out systematically (Srimannarayana, 2001).This is the negative side of training.This mixed situation might be the reason for a moderate level of the training transfer climate in India.In the ultimate analysis, it may be stated that organizations have to take steps to enhance positive transfer climate through proper policies and practices.

Table 1 .
The organizational information

Table 2 .
The respondents' information

Table 3 .
Individual items that secured higher and lower ratings 3 Supervisors give poor performance reports to those who do the job the way it is taught in training instead of his/her way 2.57 4 Employees who successfully use their training are likely to receive a salary increase 2.61 5 Employees who use training are overlooked for pay raises and promotions 2.62

Table 4 .
Transfer climate based on organizational and respondents' factors

Table 5 .
Means of transfer climate constructs

Table 6
The transfer climate constructs such as peer support, supervisor support, and opportunity to use training on-the-job are better placed than the others.This situation might be because of the existing training policies and practices.In India, almost all corporate companies have training person-days.Employees are nominated for various training programs.Internal faculty members were developed in most of the organizations.Those organizations covered under ISO certification programs gave high emphasis to training and development activities.This is the positive side of training, which may contribute to positive training transfer climate.But they are still to graduate from training and development orientation to creation of learning environment