Work environment and training transfer: The moderating effects of motivation

Organizations spend a lot of money to improve employees' performances and organization's productivity through continually conducting professional education activities such as training. However, more than eighty percent of the training outcomes in terms of knowledge, skills and abilities gained in training programs were not applied back into the real workplace. This is a conceptual paper that reviews and analyses several literatures regarding the work environment, trainees' motivation and training transfer. The paper goes on to analyse three factors of work environment namely support, resistance or openness to change and personal outcome. It reviews Learning Transfer System Inventory Model (LTSI) and a goal-setting theory in order to understand the work environment, the motivation to training transfer and the process of training transfer. These two models are appropriate because of its comprehensiveness in covering all aspects of training transfer from both individual and organization views. The findings of this study presented a framework on the relationship between work environment and the training transfer and how the trainees' motivations moderate this relationship. This paper ends with recommendation on how the framework can be used in understanding the important factors that help to increase the level of training transfer in the workplace.