The Impact of Training on the Performance of Public Sector Employees: An Empirical Study on the Administrative Staff at Ain Shams University

Abstract

For years, the public sector in Egypt has been criticized for being irresponsive of the technological changes taking place and the increasingly growing demand for more competent employees.Recently, however, new legal regulations have been imposed to ensure upgrading the skills capacity of public institutions to cope with the revolutionary changes taking place in local and global markets and to anticipate the increasing demand for better quality of public services. Specifically, the role of training has been highlighted in recent years as a means for improving the performance of public sector employees and creating a more competent workforce (Cotten, 2007; Erasmus & Swanepoel, 2005; Laing, 2009). However, the relationship between training and performance is anything but straightforward. An adequate investigation of the impact of training on performance requires specifying the particular measures of training and of performance used in the analysis. This research will explore the impact of four training variables on employees' task, contextual, and overall performance. In addition, how different training types affect performance will be investigated in order to identify which type best leverages the performance of public sector employees. Study Model The following diagram (1-1) illustrates the basic variables of this study, where the independent variable is training and the dependent variable is performance. It also represents the assumed relationships among these variables, which are tested through the study hypotheses.