학습자 특성이 조직차원의 기업교육성과에 미치는 영향

Abstract

The Effect of Learner Characteristics on Corporate Educational Performance at Organizational Level -Focusing on the Moderating Effect of Educational Program Characteristic Factors-

Hye Mi Kwon

Department of Business Administration, The Graduate School, Pukyong National University

Abstract

In the rapidly changing business environment along with the era of globalization and knowledge-based competition today, companies are trying to survive by putting consistent efforts into developing and training human resources. It is because they regard human resources not only as one of the corporate management activity subjects, but as a key performance factor that increases business competitiveness. In other words, the importance of human resource development educational programs is quite commonly recognized for better corporate performance. From the standpoint of companies, however, when the performance of investment in human resource development education is lower than expected, they may not find it effective to continue such an education program, further failing to realize the value of human resource development education. Therefore, research into the effect of human resource development educational programs on corporate educational performance is necessary to create better corporate performance. In reality, however, most of the previous studies have focused on analyzing the corporate educational performance on individual corporate workers, while there are only few ones on corporate educational performance from a corporate perspective. The first purpose of this study is to summarize the concepts of factors affecting corporate educational performance through a theoretical review of corporate educational performance. The second one is to analyze the causal relationship between factors affecting corporate educational performance and corporate education performance itself, and empirically analyze its possible moderating effects. The last one is to provide theoretical and practical implications through the research results. Based on the previous studies, this study divided learner characteristics into learner motivation and learner competency as factors affecting educational performance at organizational level, which is a dependent variable. Goal orientation, activity orientation and learning orientation were chosen as variables of learner motivation, while cognitive ability and prior knowledge & experience were chosen as variables of learner competency, all of which were used as independent variables. Besides, the job relevance to educational contents and the suitability of educational methods were chosen as moderating variables of program characteristics when a research model was set up for this study. In order to verify hypotheses with the research model, this study conducted survey on corporate workers who had experienced corporate education at work. 410 copies of the questionnaire were collected in total, of which 359 ones were finally selected for analysis, except 43 ones that failed to respond or responded unreliably. To verify the research purposes and hypotheses, this study adopted hierarchical regression analysis based on SPSS 25.0. to analyze the collected data. The hypothesis test results show that three kinds of learner motivations, goal-oriented motivation, activity-oriented motivation and learning-oriented motivation, have directly significant effects on corporate educational performance. As kinds of learner competencies, cognitive ability was found to have significant effects on corporate educational performance, but prior knowledge and experience did not have any significant effect. The moderating effect analysis results show that the job relevance to educational contents has moderating effects on learning-oriented motivation and educational performance at organizational level. It was also found that the suitability of educational methods has moderating effects on goal-oriented motivation and educational performance at organizational level, and even on prior knowledge & experience and educational performance at organizational level as well. The theoretical and practical implications of this study can be summarized as below. Firstly, among the factors affecting educational performance at organizational level, all kinds of learner motivations (goal orientation, activity orientation and learning orientation) show significant results. This finding implies that educational program participants’ individual motivations can lead to educational performance at organizational level, although most of the educational programs at work are not what they voluntarily participate in. If companies want to create better educational performance, they should figure out educational program participants’ motivations and pay more attention to how to satisfy them in advance. Then, they will be able to create more positive educational performance at organizational level. Secondly, cognitive ability was found to have significantly positive effects on educational performance at organizational level among all the kinds of learner competencies. This finding implies that learner cognitive ability is one of the important factors in creating educational performance at organizational level. Therefore, it was judged that educational performance at organizational level can be further improved when companies understand educational program participants' cognitive abilities in advance and provide them with customized educational programs. Lastly, this study discovered that as educational program characteristics, the job relevance to educational contents and the suitability of educational methods have partial moderating effects on learner characteristics and educational performance at organizational level. Most of all, it was found that moderating effect is in the interaction term between learning-orientated motivation and the job relevance to educational contents. This finding shows that if highly job-related educational contents are provided to learners with intellectual curiosity or desires to learn, it can lead to the improvement of educational performance at organizational level. It was also confirmed that moderating effect is in the interaction term between goal-oriented motivation and the suitability of educational methods. This finding also shows that goal-oriented motivation is a factor that directly affects educational performance at organizational level, but when proper educational methods are provided, it can lead to higher educational performance at organizational level. Moreover, it was found that moderating effect is in the interaction term between prior knowledge & experience and the suitability of educational methods. This finding implies that prior knowledge & experience do not have directly significant effects on educational performance at organizational level, but that the suitability of educational methods still has positive effects on the improvement of educational performance at organizational level.

Keywords: Corporate educational performance, Learner characteristics, Learner motivation, Learner competency, Educational program characteristics, Moderating effect