Page 304 - Psychological Management of Individual Performance

evaluation process 289
progress of participants evaluation is highly recommended. Very often evaluation is done
but only half-heartedly. It is not uncommon to find that the necessary pre-training data
is missing, or that the wrong questions have been asked, or that there has been con-
tamination in the measurement process and key indicators have somehow gone missing.
Statisticians may insist on a control group to see if there has been a change in the group
which has undergone training as compared to the group which has not undergone training.
The criteria upon which training programmes are normally evaluated can be divided
into three major categories: contribution to organisational goals, achievement of learning
objectives, and/or perceptions of the trainees and their managers.
If you focus an organisation’s priorities then you can evaluate the training programme
as compared with the goals set prior to the training programme. It is useful to delineate a
baseline before the training programme begins and after it has been completed to be able
to identify the training programme’s effect. To make effective evaluations, the evaluation
design must specify not only what will be counted, but also when. This necessitates anal-
ysis of several areas: pre-training, post-training and post-training follow-up evaluations,
as shown in Figure 13.5, are an indication of whether the criteria contribute to your goals.
The process should continue until management is satisfied that problems no longer exist.
The following example shows the evaluation process conducted by the firm and the
conclusions that can be drawn from it as to the effectiveness of the overall introductory-
level leadership training programme.

INTRODUCTORY-LEVEL LEADERSHIP TRAINING:THE EVALUATION PROCESS
OF THE MANAGEMENT TRAINING COURSE

There were various ways of evaluating the success of the training course. First of all,
after each module the participants gave some written and oral feedback and completed
a training evaluation form. This feedback enabled the training department to see if the
learning goals had been achieved or if improvements were necessary in the content of
the course. Participants evaluated the trainer’s abilities, the organisation of the course and
the overall applicability of the course.
The second source of evaluation was a survey done three months after the last module of
each training programme. The entire training course was assessed by all former participants
to find out how significant a contribution it had made in supporting them in their new
leadership role, and how applicable the content had been in the context of their day-to-day
working environment as well as to what extent they had been able to improve their own
leadership behaviour.
In general the results indicated that the training course provided a valuable support
system for newly appointed managers and that the content was extremely relevant to their
work environment. Nevertheless there was room for improvement with regard to the support
and encouragement offered by the managers of the newly appointed managers throughout
the training programme.
A third source of evaluation data came from the internal assessment centres. One of
the requirements for becoming a third-level manager (middle manager) was to attend an
assessment centre where strategic, leadership and sales skills were assessed. An evaluation
of the people assessed at the centres revealed that the successful participants who had
very good scores in the area of leadership behaviour had all attended the introductory-
level leadership training programme. Those who had not attended this course displayed
significantly lower scores in leadership behaviour. This represented a quasi-experimental
design because one could take the group who had not attended the training course as
a control group and the group that had as an experimental group. The experimental