Opportunities to improve skills and to teach and train others: Employee outcomes in the United States and Japan

Opportunities to improve skills and opportunities to teach or train others may be associated with job satisfaction, work engagement and organizational commitment. The analysis reported in this paper used a subsample of 823 employees within two Japanese and three American worksites. We tested not only the direct relationships of each type of training opportunity (to improve skills and to teach or train others) with each of three outcomes (job satisfaction, work engagement and organizational commitment) but also the potential moderating roles of performance orientation, job security and age. The relationships were assessed separately for Japanese and American respondents. The results highlight the importance of opportunities to improve skills for all three outcomes and of opportunities to teach and train for job satisfaction and work engagement. Performance orientation, job security and age generally were not significant moderators and, when they were, the effects were typically restricted to one country. The consistently positive coefficients for training opportunities should provide insight for cross-national organizations seeking to identify human resource policies effective across varying cultural, economic and demographic contexts.