The Combined Effects of Three Pretraining Strategies on Motivation and Performance: An Empirical Exploration

Abstract

With the rapid changes in the American economy, corporate attention has shifted toward establishing a more central role for the training function in U.S. firms (e.g., Carnevale, 1991). Of course, American industry already has invested heavily in training and development; however, the pace of investment is expected to rapidly quicken (Boyett and Conn, 1990). However, as more firms increase their investment in human capital, a troubling question continually resurfaces, namely, that trainers know remarkably little about how to effectively design and administer training programs. Noe (1986) has observed that most empirical studies of the antecedents of training performance have focused on the relationship between individuals' abilities and background experiences and mastery of the program content. For example, the six individual characteristics investigated in a recent comprehensive study of military training performance by Mumford et al. (1988) included cognitive aptitude, reading level, prior course work, educational level, education preparation, and age. The focus on individual ability and background experiences has evolved in spite of a recurring lament of trainers and educators that their trainees and students generally have ample ability, but often lack sufficient motivation to learn. As trainers well know, even if individuals possess the prerequisite ability to learn course content, performance will still be poor if motivation is low or absent. Similarly, motivational effects can completely swamp the potential benefits of well-designed instruction (Campbell, 1989). Of course, trainee motivation and attitudes have long been a concern of instructional designers who have prescribed a variety of design and administrative strategies to enhance learning in the instructional setting. However, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to administrative strategies that could be enacted prior to when trainees enter a training program and which positively affect trainee motivation and learning. Moreover, several authors (cf., Campbell, 1989; Goldstein, 1993) have recently suggested that those individuals who have positive attitudes upon entry into a training program are more likely to achieve successful training outcomes, and that contention has been supported empirically as well (Baldwin and Magjuka, 1991). Perhaps the most compelling reason for interest in pretraining motivation is the belief that, at least relative to cognitive ability and background, motivation is potentially subject to change (Wlodkowski, 1985). Further, while a variety of motivational approaches have been empirically supported in other contexts (e.g., goal setting, participating, and accountability), there is no evidence to suggest which of several strategies might be best suited to training interventions. While a simplistic prescription might be try everything which has been shown to motivate or improve trainee performance, that is neither realistic nor an appropriate tack in most training environments. That is, the influence of different design and administrative strategies may have unintended consequences very different from the strategies employed individually. The focus on the combined influence of training interventions is especially important in the development of a theory of design and administration of training practice. Finally, we do recognize that a trainer could design and administer the pretraining environment to increase the cognitive as well as the motivational benefits accruing to trainees (e.g., more focused attention, more energy or greater strategy-development) (Latham et al., 1992). That is, a trainer could adopt pre-training strategies that directly influence trainee motivation and performance. The purpose of the present research, then, was to investigate the effects of three managerial strategies that are assumed to increase trainee motivation and performance. The strategies explored in this study were operationalizations of three widely recognized managerial techniques: (1) participation, (2) goal setting, and (3) accountability. …

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