Role Understanding And Training Effectiveness Of Corporate Trainers: A Chinese Cultural Based Study

Due to the increasing strategic value of human capital for most enterprises in China, systematic corporate training and development is no longer limited to knowledge transfer and exchange of information only. Its impacts on the business performance gain significance importance. Meanwhile, China's rapid economic development makes more and more multinational companies investing in China, employing Chinese knowledge workers, and also highlighting the cultural differences, which make many overseas training methods and strategies losing of the original effectiveness. How to make the training delivered effectively in China becomes the new challenge for multinational companies.This study based on the Chinese culture context and combined the qualitative and quantitative research approach to analyze corporate trainer's role understanding from the trainer's perspective, and to explore the relationship between trainer's behaviors, which are relevant to different trainer roles, and sub dimensions of training effectiveness from the trainee's perspective.In the qualitative study, we conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with 58 training experts and consultants in corporate training and development area in different cities in China and Germany. All participants were divided into three categories, Chinese group, International group, and German group, according to their working location and target audience group. Interview data was fully transcribed and then analyzed using grounded theory with the help of Atlas.ti software. We found out that there are seven different trainer role understandings: Four of them are specific Chinese trainers' role understandings: Learning Orientator, Role Model, Problem Solver, and Service Provider; Two of them are common trainer role understandings from all interviewees: Knowledge Transfer, Learning Utilizer; and One specific trainer role understanding from German trainers' perspectives: Group Facilitator. In the quantitative study, with the foundation of trainer's role understanding we got the corresponding trainer ability model by comparison and generalization. Later we developed the questionnaire of Chinese corporate trainer's behaviors and traits, and distributed it to trainees with the combination of training effectiveness and evaluation questionnaire. The result showed that Learning Orientator is the role that has most widely effect on training effectiveness, and the other trainer roles also influence and work on different sub dimensions of training effectiveness.