Presenting a Training Transfer Black Box Model in Employees’ Development by Meta-synthesis Approach

Expenditures and investments on employee training and development are justifiable when they subsequently be applied by people in their jobs and lead to personal and organizational performance improvement. In this field, “training transfer” has become one of the most important concerns of experts and researchers in the area of organizational training. Despite of previous researches numerous efforts in describing the causal conditions and factors influencing training transfer, the existing knowledge in this field is scattered and the gap and importance of integrating previous research findings in an integrative model is obvious. Considering the existence of sufficient secondary data in the related literature, in this study, researchers collected and synthesized the scattered data among three disciplines of management, psychology, and instructional technology by applying meta-synthesis method and systematic study of 69 previous articles. As a result, the study led to presenting a tri-level and multidisciplinary “training transfer” model in organizations. Since in this study, all accessible related secondary data were synthesized, it can be expected that its findings can be a suitable foundation for the related future studies and be able to decrease the potential mistakes in wrong executive and/or unidimensional research approach toward this multi-dimensional concept. At the end, besides discussion on the findings, some future research directions are also presented.