Multiple Roles Understanding of Chinese Trainers
in Corporate Training and Development
Hora Tjitra & Zheng Jiewei
Many business leaders are growing fearful because they recognized that their firms’ future success will depend on employees’ competencies that traditionally have not been actively managed or measured. As a result, there is an urgent call for effective training delivery. Meanwhile, because of Chinese innovational economic policy and abundant resource, more and more multinational companies come to China and set up business trying to extend their brand and make potential profit out of such a big market. There is one more critical factor added to effective training: cross-cultural differences in learning and training. This study is a follow up of the Cross-Cultural Learning project which was cooperated with SAP AG, Germany, so the former result, especially the typical and unique trainer roles that adapt to Chinese learners is the foundation of this study.
Objectives:
- To test whether the multiple trainer roles we found in CCL can be confirmed by most Chinese learners, trainers and people from organizational perspective
- To explore the relationship between different trainer roles and training effectiveness
- To develop an instrument to measure the role that trainer plays in training, including the description and the requirements of seven different roles
- To compare the different understandings about the
influence of different roles on training effectiveness
from different perspectives
Research Questions & Hypothesis:
- Do Chinese trainers really play several different roles in the training? And what kind of role they usually play? Chinese trainers do have their own typical and unique roles in training and most of them are similar to the results we found from analyzing the expert interviews.
- Is there any relationship between trainer roles and training effectiveness? There is little former research in this area, and seldom talking about the importance of trainer roles in effective trainings. We are certain that different trainer roles affects training in different aspects although we are not sure which role influences most on which criteria of effective training.
- Will we find any difference from the results of
three different perspectives? The perception of
qualified trainer and effective training would be
different from the learner’s, trainer’s, and
organizational perspectives. And the results of
comparison would be helpful for all of the three parts.
Research Method:
Quantitative online survey with two channels web-base online questionnaire and paper-pencil questionnaire
Participants:
The participants come from three different parts:
- Learners – employees from different kinds of companies, such as state owned company, private owned enterprise, and multinational company located in China
- Trainers – native Chinese trainers who deliver training to internal employees, external customers or cooperated partners
- HR officers – people who work in HR department and
usually responsible for the trainings, including make
training program, look for suitable trainers,
coordinate training schedule, and supervise
post-training examination/evaluation
Expected Result & Possible Application:
- Confirmation of the existence of multiple roles that Chinese trainers play in corporate training and development and the relationship between different roles and training effectiveness
- Suggestions on how to enhance the training effectiveness from trainers’ aspect by comparing the results from three different perspectives
- Using the questionnaire as a checklist to test
foreign trainers’ competence if they want to deliver
trainings to Chinese learners successfully or a
handbook for them to refer to
