Page 276 - Psychological Management of Individual Performance

260 enhancing performance through training
RELAPSE PREVENTION INTERVENTIONS

Relapse prevention aims to assist skill maintenance by helping trainees to identify po-
tential obstacles to transfer and develop appropriate coping responses. Marx (1982)
recommended that as part of a relapse prevention program, trainees should be informed
about the relapse process so that they are prepared for potential difficulties. Trainees
should then identify high-risk situations where the new skills may not be maintained,
e.g., a lack of opportunity to perform trained skills on the job may be identified as a
potential impediment to transfer. Finally, coping responses for overcoming these obsta-
cles need to be brainstormed and practiced. For examples, trainees who decide to enlist
the assistance of their supervisor in finding practice opportunities may role play various
ways of approaching their supervisor with such a request.
Current evidence suggests that relapse prevention interventions can in fact facilitate
the generalization and maintenance of complex skills. Tziner, Haccoun, and Kadish
(1991) found that including a relapse prevention component in an instructional design
course led to more frequent application of the trained skills in the ten-week period
following training than when the relapse prevention program was not available. Frayne
and Latham (1987) reported on a self-management program for employees with high
levels of absenteeism, that included writing contracts and setting goals, as well as relapse
prevention-style interventions, such as brainstorming potential problems and solutions.
Job attendance rates and the level of course knowledge demonstrated three months after
the training program were retained significantly at a nine-month follow-up (Latham &
Frayne, 1989). Similarly, Gist, Bavetta, and Stevens (1990) found that a self-management
program including relapse prevention improved the generalization of negotiating skills.

EVALUATION AS AN INTEGRAL PART OF TRAINING
Carefully planned evaluation serves several purposes. First, the requirement to evaluate
makes it even more necessary to carry out the needs analysis. Second, the evaluation
grows from the TNA and the TTNA that provide a set of outcome and training process
goals. Third, the follow-up implicit in an evaluation provides an opportunity to practice
the skills learned during training. The follow-up performance tests that are included in
the evaluation may provide a booster to skill retention and transfer, an issue that should be
explored in future research. Fourth, the results of the evaluation provide feedback that can
be used to decide whether training programs should be retained, modified, or abandoned
(Kraiger & Jung, 1996). Finally, the process of following up to check whether transfer
has occurred sends a clear signal to managers and trainees that the behaviours, skills and
meta-cognitions addressed during training are considered important by the organization.
The benefits of conducting evaluations are well known, but in practice training pro-
grams are often not subjected to systematic scrutiny. Evaluation designs that incorporate
the experimental principles of random allocation to groups, pre- and post-training mea-
surement, and the use of control groups are often advocated to protect the validity of the
evaluation. However, these strategies may be difficult to implement given the constraints
often experienced by practitioners in the field. For example, statistical power may be
reduced considerably if a control group is used when sample sizes are small (Sackett &
Mullen, 1993). Evaluation is further hampered by a lack of an adequate theoretical