This article meta-analytically summarizes the literature on training motivation, its antecedents, and its relationships with training outcomes such as declarative knowledge, skill acquisition, and transfer. Significant predictors of training motivation and outcomes included individual characteristics (e.g., locus of control, conscientiousness, anxiety, age, cognitive ability, self-efficacy, valence, job involvement) and situational characteristics (e.g., climate). Moreover, training motivation explained incremental variance in training outcomes beyond the effects of cognitive ability. Meta-analytic path analyses further showed that the effects of personality, climate, and age on training outcomes were only partially mediated by self-efficacy, valence, and job involvement. These findings are discussed in terms of their practical significance and their implications for an integrative theory of training motivation.

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Toward an integrative theory of training motivation: A meta-analytic path analysis of 20 years of research.

This study develops a model of engagement in the multiple roles of work and family. I examine two competing arguments about the effects of engaging in multiple roles, depletion and enrichment, and integrate them by identifying the type of emotional response to a role, negative or positive, as a critical contrasting assumption held by these two perspectives. Moreover, I represent depletion and enrichment as complex multistep processes that include multiple constructs, such as engagement and emotion. This study jointly examines both the depleting and enriching processes that link engagement in one role to engagement in another, using structural equation modeling. Findings from a survey of 790 employees reveal evidence for both depletion and enrichment as well as gender differences. Specifically, depletion existed only for women and only in the work-to-family direction. Men experienced enrichment from work to family, while women experienced enrichment from family to work. Overall, more linkages were found be...

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Enriching or Depleting? The Dynamics of Engagement in Work and Family Roles:

This article illustrates how work contexts motivate employees to care about making a positive difference in other people's lives. I introduce a model of relational job design to describe how jobs spark the motivation to make a prosocial difference, and how this motivation affects employees' actions and identities. Whereas existing research focuses on individual differences and the task structures of jobs, I illuminate how the relational architecture of jobs shapes the motivation to make a prosocial difference.

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Relational Job Design and the Motivation to Make a Prosocial Difference

This study investigates the mediating role of work engagement (i.e. vigour and dedication) among job resources (i.e. job control, feedback and variety) and proactive behaviour at work. This mediating role was investigated, using Structural Equation Modelling in two independent samples from Spain (n = 386 technology employees) and the Netherlands (n = 338 telecom managers). Results in both samples confirmed that work engagement fully mediates the impact of job resources on proactive behaviour. Subsequent multigroup analyses revealed that the strengths of the structural paths of the mediation model were invariant across both national samples, underscoring the cross-national validity of the model

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A cross-national study of work engagement as a mediator between job resources and proactive behaviour

Old Friends, New Faces: Motivation Research in the 1990s:

Work motivation: Theory and practice.

A comprehensive theoretical model of work attitudes, motivation, and performance is presented that integrates key constructs prevalent in more limited theories. The constructs were selected on the basis of their importance as shown by past research and because of their seeming complementarity rather than redundance with one another. The framework connects the constructs causally on the basis of both logic and empirical evidence. It is expressed in the form of a path diagram amenable to empirical test, in the hope that it will have heuristic value. It is expected that such an integration will provide a better basis for understanding and improving work attitudes, motivation, and performance than do the more limited approaches.

Donna E. Thompson

Papers

Work motivation: Theory and practice.

An Integrative Model of Work Attitudes, Motivation, and Performance