Individual and Team Training

For the purposes of this chapter, training is defined as a planned intervention that is designed to enhance the determinants of individual job performance, when the individual functions independently or as a member of a team. Individual job performance is conceptualized as in recent research on performance modeling (e.g., Borman & Motowidlo, 1993; Campbell, Gasser & Oswald, 1996; Murphy, 1989); that is, performance is defined as behaviors or actions that are judged relevant for the organization's goals and that can be scaled in terms of the level of the individual's contribution they represent. For virtually any position, job, or occupation, performance is multidimensional and it is reasonable to think in terms of the major performance factors as describing the critical dimensions along which an individual job holder should be trying to excel.

Given a sample of job holders, individual differences in performance on each of the factors are a function of multiple determinants. Campbell, McCloy, Oppler and Sager (1993) argued that it is useful to think of direct and indirect determinants and that there are three kinds of direct determinants: knowledge, skill, and volitional choice behavior. Consequently, performance on a particular factor can be improved only by enhancing job relevant knowledge, job relevant skill, or developing more advantageous choice behavior (e.g., choosing to come to work more often, choosing to expend more effort, or choosing to expend effort for a more sustained period of time).

Individual differences in each of the direct determinants are in turn a function of multiple indirect determinants, one of which is training and instruction. Other indirect determinants are such things as abilities (i.e., relatively stable traits) or interventions of a ‘motivational’ nature (e.g., new reward systems, threats, etc.). There could also be interactive effects. Training then is an attempt to enhance performance relevant knowledge, skill, and/or choice behavior via instruction.

A similar explication applies to team training. Obviously there are different types of teams varying from the very traditional work group to the very autonomous, highly cross-trained, self-managed, high performance work team (Guzzo & Shea, 1992). There is nothing necessarily mysterious about teamwork or team self management. It is simply that the determinants of team performance that are responsive to a training intervention may also involve interactive effects among the knowledges, skills, and choice behaviors of its members, as well as individual levels of knowledge, skill, and choice. The question of how to enhance both the individual effects and the interactive effects via training is the team training issue.

...