M53 - Personnel Economics: TrainingReturn

With the COVID-19 pandemic, organisations faced profound social and economic upheaval. These circumstances forced organisations to make major changes. In the face of these changes, nurturing employee engagement and fostering a sense of belonging to the company have emerged as new challenges. Organisational commitment appears to be an important factor in ensuring that employees remain in the organisation despite the crises that occur. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to investigate the determinants of the organisational commitment of employees from the level of human resource management (HRM) policy during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, this study aims to gain a clear understanding of the relationship between training and organisational commitment through employee engagement in HRM COVID-19 strategies. We also considered the climate of implementation of HRM strategies during COVID-19 that may moderate the effect of training on participation in HRM COVID-19 strategies. The study was carried out among 378 organisations operating in Poland. To verify the hypotheses, the SPSS program with PROCESS Macro (Model 4 and 7) analysis was used. The mediation test was used to understand the influence of training on other variables, namely employee engagement in HRM COVID-19 strategies and organisational commitment. To examine the mechanism of organisational commitment, a moderated mediation model was tested in which the organisational HRM COVID-19 strategy climate moderated the training mediation model, employee support for HRM COVID-19 strategies and organisational commitment. The results show that organisational HRM COVID-19 strategy climate accounted for significant differences in the mediation models.
Implications for Central European audience: This study bridges the gap in the literature on organisational commitment by explaining how training is associated with organisational commitment. Managers are advised to consistently offer ongoing training to help them navigate evolving circumstances. Enhancing the impact of training on organisational commitment requires a focus on improving the quality of human resource management (HRM) COVID-19 strategies, fostering a supportive environment and garnering employee support for these strategies. Individuals are likely to demonstrate greater organisational commitment when the organisation cultivates an environment that enables employees to endorse HRM COVID-19 strategies.

Trends such as advances in digital technologies and diversity in talent management necessitate continuous learning in the workplace and make European employers think about what competencies of their employees, in addition to basic digital competencies, are most in demand both today and in the foreseeable future. Considering this, identifying the main trends in employee training and development in the automotive industry in Central Europe and their impact on current and future competency profiles becomes the main purpose of this article. Both primary and secondary data have been analysed. The qualitative methodology in this article is based on the processing of the primary data from eight semi-structured interviews conducted from June to October 2023 with human resource managers and learning and development managers of selected Czech companies related to the automotive sector. An essential secondary data source was Eurostat’s Continuous Vocational Training Survey on employee training and development within European countries in 2020 among 113,000 businesses. The findings in this article demonstrate that digital competency and soft skills are currently the most important competencies for employee development within the automotive sector in Central Europe.
Implications for Central European audience: The results presented in this article emphasise the importance of adapting actual employee training and development programmes to technology trends influencing the automotive industry. It has been proven that employees’ soft competencies are preferable today and will be in great demand in the next three years. This is because soft skills support the successful implementation of change and improve the competitiveness of the business in the long term, and both education and development managers and employees themselves realise this.

This article aims to investigate the impact of training perception on work engagement. In addition, self-efficacy and organisational based self-esteem are hypothesised as mediators of the above relationship. Data were collected from employees in Vietnam using a self-administered questionnaire survey. Path analyses with Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) were used to verify the proposed relationships. The results show that both perceived training benefits and transfer of training significantly and positively influence work engagement. In addition, organisational based self-esteem partially mediates the impact of perceived training benefit on work engagement. Self-efficacy mediates a portion of the effects of the transfer of training on work engagement. The results add to the existing literature on the determinants of work engagement and on the consequences of the transfer of training. The findings also provide insight into the conditions for effective training in organisations.
Implications for Central European audience: Developing an engaged workforce is a vital task to all organisations. However, data showed that the work engagement level in Europe is low, especially in Central Europe. The results of the study provide insight into the determinants of employee engagement at work. In addition, like Vietnam, most countries in Central Europe have been in transition from former central-command systems to market economies. The application of contemporary Western human resource practices needs special consideration to ensure its effectiveness. The current study may supply some empirical implications for both academics and practitioners.

Nowadays, many companies make a great deal of effort to take full advantage of digital transformation and stay ahead of their competitors. The influence of digitalisation on manpower development and human capabilities as well as on the business environment, in general, is especially noticeable in the construction and automotive sectors. That is why the main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of new digital technologies on employee competency development in Czech construction and automotive companies. The quantitative methodology is based on primary data collection conducted from July through October 2020 using the CAWI method. As a result, 27 responses from Czech construction companies and 39 responses from Czech automotive companies have been gathered in Survio software, processed and analysed by using descriptive statistics and Pearson’s chi-square test of independence. The qualitative data analysis applied in this paper includes three semi-structured interviews with human resource managers of selected Czech companies in the automotive industry. The advantages and disadvantages of the Covid-19 pandemic situation from the point of view of human resource management and employee training have also been analysed in the presented case study. The findings in this paper confirm that creating a digitally ready workforce and changing the employees’; mindset towards the new style of doing their jobs remain significant challenges to deal with in the Czech construction and automotive industries.
Implications for Central European audience: This paper focuses primarily on the training and professional development of people employed in the construction and automotive sectors, which have been highly affected by the ongoing digitalisation of business and the current Covid-19 pandemic situation. As the results further demonstrate, the widespread use of digital technologies can definitely help to enhance employees’; digital competencies. However, the employees still have to get used to a digitalised workplace. In such conditions, the role of human resource managers is key in the implementation of continuous training as part of the corporate culture.

Negative feedback has been repeatedly identified as beneficial for organizational learning, adaptability, and performance. Despite having these advantages, most organizations still do not use negative feedback to its full potential, as they fail to spread it correctly among their members. The application of negative feedback, therefore, faces several issues like misuse or process avoidance that are mostly driven by psychological factors. The purpose of this paper is to discuss potential benefits of a newly emerged organizational approach called radical candor for contemporary state of the art in feedback-related behavior and to propose how it might be successfully applied in organizational settings. We define radical candor as a proactive and compassionate engagement in an unpleasant and direct feedback process. Radical candor may help reduce the influence of psychological factors like extreme levels of attachment, harsh emotions or low self-esteem in order to make organizational members more engaged and satisfied with the negative feedback process. Organizations willing to apply radical candor might consider either official implementation from top to bottom (through managers and leadership) or unofficial intervention through the agents (employees of all levels) depending on company characteristics.

This paper focuses on the current state of art in mindfulness research on workplace and identifies some of the necessary steps and risks in the creation of mindful leadership theory. Mindfulness has the potential to effectively address three topical organizational challenges of growing demands on adaptability, prevailing issues of work-related stress and the necessity to raise the moral level in organizations. Current studies seem to suitably respond to the issues of work-related stress; however, the challenges of adaptability and morality so far lack appropriate empirical validation. Lack of empirical support is also noticeable in the case of mindful leadership theory as most studies still focus solely on individual leader development. However, it is important to start to discuss the suitable core variables of mindful leadership now as a clear differentiation from other leadership approaches like authentic leadership will be crucial for successful creation of mindful leadership theory. This paper also presents recommendations for entrepreneurs and managers willing to incorporate mindfulness into their organizational settings.

This paper discusses possible approaches for business schools regarding how to educate students to be future generators of sustainable value for business and society at large and to work for an inclusive and sustainable global economy. On the basis of the recently published Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) as well as contemporary learning theories, the paper provides concrete recommendations about how to foster students' development towards becoming long-term thinking, responsible business leaders. The paper argues that student learning needs to occur within powerful learning environments to provide active, problem-based and self-directed acquisition of knowledge, skills and attitudes. Two approaches to create best-practice learning environments are real-life case studies and real-life student projects which both lead to strong buy-in from students, faculty and company partners. Both approaches are exemplified with the International Management bachelor's degree program at Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland. As a result, responsible management education fosters students' knowledge, skills and attitudes towards responsible business leadership to shape the future direction of the 21st century.