BUSI 750 Week 8 Strategic HRD Research Proposal Example

When Development Pays: Supervisor Support as a Moderator of Frontline Leader Development Outcomes in Community Banks

Introduction

Community banks depend on their branch and department managers more than large banks do. Without national brands or large marketing budgets, they compete on relationships, and those relationships are built and kept by local managers and the teams they lead. When an experienced manager retires or leaves, the bank loses institutional knowledge and often customers. For that reason, many community banks invest in programs that develop newly promoted managers into capable leaders. The twelve banks in a regional banking association that will serve as the setting for this study share a common eight-month program for new managers, built by the association and delivered at each bank. Each bank spends about $6,000 per participant, and together they enroll about 150 managers a year.

Succession is a particular concern in the association's banks. Their HR directors estimate that a third of current branch managers will reach retirement age within ten years, and the banks have increasingly promoted tellers, personal bankers and loan officers into management with little prior supervisory experience. The program was built to close that gap, combining monthly workshops, a coaching relationship with a senior manager outside the participant's reporting line and a capstone project on a branch problem.

The banks' own data suggest uneven results. Participants rate the program highly, yet some banks report that graduates lead much as they did before, and voluntary turnover on new managers' teams varies widely from bank to bank. The program content is identical across banks, so the variation must come from something else. Transfer of training research points to an obvious candidate: what happens when participants return to work. The study proposed here tests whether the support new managers receive from their own supervisors determines whether the program changes their leadership and the retention of their teams.

Definition of Terms

Leader development program refers to the association's eight-month program for newly promoted managers. Perceived supervisor support refers to a manager's belief that their own supervisor encourages and assists the use of what was learned on the job, as measured by the Learning Transfer System Inventory. Empowering leadership refers to leader behaviors that share power with team members and build their capacity to act, as defined by Arnold et al. (2000). Team voluntary turnover refers to resignations by members of the manager's team, excluding retirements, dismissals and internal transfers, divided by the team's average headcount over twelve months. Newly promoted manager refers to an employee in the first year of a role that includes formal supervision of at least three employees.

Problem Statement

The general problem is that organizations spend heavily on leadership development but often cannot show that it changes behavior on the job. Lacerenza et al. (2017) found in a meta-analysis that leadership training can produce substantial gains in transfer and results, yet the size of those gains varied with how programs were designed and implemented. The specific problem is that community banks in the association deliver an identical program with uneven effects, and they do not know which conditions in the workplace account for the difference. Without that knowledge, the banks cannot decide whether to change the program, change what happens around it or stop funding it.

Purpose Statement

The purpose of this quantitative, nonequivalent comparison group study is to examine whether perceived supervisor support for the use of learning moderates the relationship between participation in a leader development program and two outcomes, empowering leadership behavior as rated by direct reports and voluntary turnover on the manager's team, among newly promoted managers in twelve community banks in the southeastern United States.

Research Questions and Hypotheses

RQ1: To what extent does participation in the leader development program predict empowering leadership behavior and team voluntary turnover twelve months after promotion?

H1a: Participants will receive higher empowering leadership ratings from direct reports than comparison managers, controlling for baseline ratings.

H1b: Participants' teams will have lower voluntary turnover than comparison managers' teams over the twelve months.

RQ2: To what extent does perceived supervisor support moderate those relationships?

H2a: The positive relationship between participation and empowering leadership ratings will be stronger when perceived supervisor support is high.

H2b: The negative relationship between participation and team turnover will be stronger when perceived supervisor support is high.

Literature Review

Effectiveness of Leadership Development

Evidence that leadership training works has strengthened over the past two decades. Arthur et al. (2003) found medium to large average effects for organizational training across reaction, learning, behavior and results criteria, while showing that effect sizes depended on training method, the skills trained and the criterion used. Focusing on leadership programs, Lacerenza et al. (2017) analyzed 335 independent samples and reported improvements on all four criteria, with the largest effect on transfer. Their moderator analyses linked stronger effects to needs analysis, feedback, practice, spaced sessions and on-site delivery. These reviews establish that leadership development can work, but both pool studies from many organizations and programs. Neither can say why a single program produces different results in different workplaces, which is the question this study addresses.

Transfer of Training

Baldwin and Ford (1988) treated transfer as two things at once, carrying trained skills into the job and keeping them in use months later, and they sorted its predictors into what learners bring, how a program is built and what the workplace allows. Their review argued that the work environment had been understudied. Later reviews filled some of that gap. Pooling 89 studies, Blume et al. (2010) found positive relationships between transfer and a supportive work environment, and most predictors mattered more for open skills like leadership, which must be adapted to each situation, than for closed, procedural ones. Ford et al. (2018) concluded that transfer remains a problem of the whole system in which learning is applied, not only of the learning event. Leadership is an open skill, so the work environment should matter more for this program than for technical training, which is why this study focuses there.

The Role of the Supervisor

Among environmental factors, the participant's own supervisor receives the most attention. Grossman and Salas (2011) placed supervisor support among the few workplace conditions with a steady record of predicting transfer, next to a supportive climate, the chance to practice new skills and follow-up after training. Govaerts and Dochy (2014) reviewed the supervisor's role and argued that support is not a single behavior; it includes discussing training goals before a program, encouraging use of new skills afterward, providing opportunities and giving feedback. Holton et al. (2000) built supervisor support into the Learning Transfer System Inventory as a distinct factor, making it measurable. Yet most studies measure supervisor support and transfer at the same time from the same respondents, a practice Blume et al. (2010) showed can inflate relationships. Few studies test supervisor support as a moderator of a program's effect against a comparison group with outcomes rated by others, the design this study proposes.

Perceived Support and Retention

Development also affects whether employees stay. Eisenberger et al. (1986) proposed that employees develop an overall sense of how much the employer values their work and their well-being, and Rhoades and Eisenberger (2002) found in a review that perceived organizational support is associated with greater commitment and lower withdrawal. Kraimer et al. (2011) added a condition: support for development was followed by fewer voluntary exits only among employees who believed their own company had a next role for them, and by more exits among those who did not. In their hundred-year review of the turnover field, Hom et al. (2017) noted the growing attention to the role of leaders in employees' decisions to stay. No study located for this proposal has asked whether a new manager's development, conditioned on the manager's own supervisor's support, affects the turnover of the manager's team, a link from development to retention one level down.

Synthesis and Gap

Taken together, the literature establishes three points. Leadership development can change behavior and results, but its effects vary with the conditions of design and implementation. Transfer depends heavily on the work environment, especially for open skills, and the participant's supervisor is the most studied part of that environment. Support from the organization is linked to retention, but the link depends on whether employees see a future in the organization. What the literature has not done is combine these findings in a single field test: a common program delivered in several organizations, a comparison group, behavior rated by direct reports rather than participants, and an archival retention outcome one level below the participant. The proposed study fills that gap.

Theoretical Framework

The study combines two theories. The transfer model of Baldwin and Ford (1988) places the work environment among the inputs that determine whether learning is used and maintained. Social exchange theory, as applied in perceived support research (Eisenberger et al., 1986), explains why supervisor support should have that effect: when managers believe their supervisors value their growth, they reciprocate by investing effort in using what they learned. Together, the theories predict that the program will change leadership behavior most when supervisor support is high (H2a). Because empowering behavior from a manager signals to team members that they are valued, the same reasoning predicts lower turnover on those managers' teams (H2b). The model therefore runs from program participation, through supervisor support as a moderator, to the manager's behavior and the team's retention.

Method

Design

The study adopts a quasi-experimental plan: two groups that were not randomly formed, each measured before and after the program period. Random assignment is ruled out, since the banks enroll all newly promoted managers in the program as policy. However, the association's banks promote in two waves each year and enroll managers in the program in the spring, so managers promoted in the fall wait several months before beginning. During those months, fall promotees can serve as a comparison group for the spring cohort's early outcomes, and four banks that have deferred the program for budget reasons will contribute additional comparison managers. The main threat to validity is selection, since participants and comparison managers may differ. The design addresses it by measuring baseline leadership ratings, controlling for tenure, span of control and bank asset size, and comparing participants and comparison managers within the same banks wherever possible.

Population and Sample

The population is newly promoted branch and department managers in U.S. community banks with assets between $1 billion and $10 billion. The sampling frame is the twelve association banks, which promote about 300 managers over two years. An a priori power analysis in G*Power (Faul et al., 2007) for a multiple regression testing one interaction term among six predictors, with alpha of .05, power of .80 and a small effect of f-squared = .03, indicates a minimum of 264 managers. Because interaction effects in field studies are typically small, the analysis uses a conservative effect size. The study will recruit all eligible managers over two years, about 150 participants and 150 comparison managers, to allow for attrition.

Instruments

Perceived supervisor support will be measured with the supervisor support scale of the Learning Transfer System Inventory (Holton et al., 2000), completed by participants at the end of the program and by comparison managers at the matching time. Empowering leadership will be measured with the Empowering Leadership Questionnaire (Arnold et al., 2000), whose five dimensions cover modeling the expected conduct, inviting the team into decisions, coaching, keeping people informed and attending to their concerns, completed by each manager's direct reports at promotion and twelve months later. Team voluntary turnover will be taken from bank HR records as the number of voluntary separations divided by average team headcount over the twelve months. Control variables will be drawn from HR records. Both survey instruments have published evidence of their factor structure and reliability, and the study will report internal consistency for each scale in its own sample and confirm the factor structure of the Empowering Leadership Questionnaire before using its scores. Because the ratings of a manager's behavior come from several direct reports, the study will check agreement among raters before averaging their scores into a single rating for each manager.

Procedures

After approval from the university's Institutional Review Board and written agreements with each bank, the researcher will invite eligible managers by email with an explanation of the study, its voluntary nature and its confidentiality protections. Direct report surveys will be administered online by a third-party platform, so that neither managers nor banks see individual responses. HR records will be supplied with identifiers replaced by study codes.

Data Analysis

Hypotheses H1a and H1b will be tested with hierarchical regression, entering controls and baseline ratings in the first step and participation in the second. Hypotheses H2a and H2b will add perceived supervisor support and the participation by support interaction in a third step, with continuous predictors centered. Significant interactions will be probed with simple slopes at one standard deviation above and below the mean of support. Because managers are nested within banks, the analysis will also be run as a two-level model to check that bank-level differences do not drive the results. Turnover, a rate bounded at zero, will be modeled with a Poisson or negative binomial specification if its distribution requires it. Before the main analysis, the data will be screened for missing values, outliers and violations of the regression assumptions of linearity, normality of residuals and homoscedasticity. Missing survey data will be handled with multiple imputation if they exceed five percent of cases, and the analysis will be repeated without imputed cases to confirm that conclusions do not depend on the method. Results will be reported with effect sizes and confidence intervals as well as significance tests, so the banks can judge practical as well as statistical importance.

Ethical Considerations

The study involves employees reporting on their managers and organizations sharing personnel data, so confidentiality is the primary ethical concern. No bank will receive results for an individual manager or team, and every reported figure will pool at least five managers, so no individual can be identified. Participation will be voluntary and will not affect any employment decision. Managers in the comparison group will receive the program on the banks' normal schedule; the study will not delay anyone's development.

Biblical Integration

The closing chapters of Keller and Alsdorf (2012) describe what the gospel changes in a Christian's daily work: the story the worker lives in, the worth assigned to each kind of labor, the ethical bearings used on the job and the strength to keep going. Two of those ideas shape this study. The new conception holds that every worker's labor matters to God and contributes to the common good, which means the teams under these managers are not instruments of a bank's strategy but people whose work deserves good leadership. The study's choice of outcomes, how managers treat their teams and whether team members stay, reflects that conviction. The new compass calls for integrity in how work is done, which in research means honest reporting and protection of participants. If supervisor support proves to be the condition under which development pays, then the obligation it creates falls on senior leaders, not only on the trainees. That conclusion fits Keller's insistence that faith shapes how leaders serve the people under them, and it would give the banks a practical way to act on it.

Significance

For practice, the study will tell the banks whether to invest in preparing supervisors to support new managers, rather than in revising program content, and it will give HR leaders evidence that links development to retention. For research, it adds a field test of supervisor support as a moderator using other-rated behavior and archival turnover, addressing the same-source problem that Blume et al. (2010) identified, and it extends perceived support research to the retention of a developed manager's team. For the Liberty DBA's emphasis on strategic leadership, the study also shows how an HRD question can be framed in terms executives use: what conditions make a development investment pay, and who in the organization is responsible for creating them. If supervisor support matters as predicted, the association could add a short preparation module for supervisors of program participants at modest cost, and future cohorts could be used to test whether that module improves results.

Limitations and Delimitations

The study is delimited to newly promoted managers in twelve community banks in one region, so its results may not generalize to large banks or other industries. Its main limitation is the nonrandom assignment of managers to participation and comparison groups; baseline measures and controls reduce but cannot remove selection effects. Perceived supervisor support is self-reported, though the outcomes are not. Twelve months may be too short to observe the full effect on turnover. Finally, the program itself was not designed by the researcher, so the study cannot test changes to its content.

Conclusion

Community banks invest in developing new managers because their strategy depends on the relationships those managers build. The proposed study asks whether that investment pays when, and only when, the managers' own supervisors support it. If the hypotheses hold, the banks will have evidence to make supervisor preparation part of strategic HRD, moving from a program delivered as an event to a development system that includes the people who shape what happens after it.

References

Arnold, J. A., Arad, S., Rhoades, J. A., & Drasgow, F. (2000). The empowering leadership questionnaire: The construction and validation of a new scale for measuring leader behaviors. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 21(3), 249-269. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-1379(200005)21:3<249::AID-JOB10>3.0.CO;2-#

Arthur, W., Jr., Bennett, W., Jr., Edens, P. S., & Bell, S. T. (2003). Effectiveness of training in organizations: A meta-analysis of design and evaluation features. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(2), 234-245. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.88.2.234

Baldwin, T. T., & Ford, J. K. (1988). Transfer of training: A review and directions for future research. Personnel Psychology, 41(1), 63-105. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1988.tb00632.x

Blume, B. D., Ford, J. K., Baldwin, T. T., & Huang, J. L. (2010). Transfer of training: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Management, 36(4), 1065-1105. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206309352880

Eisenberger, R., Huntington, R., Hutchison, S., & Sowa, D. (1986). Perceived organizational support. Journal of Applied Psychology, 71(3), 500-507. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.71.3.500

Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Lang, A.-G., & Buchner, A. (2007). G*Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 39(2), 175-191. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193146

Ford, J. K., Baldwin, T. T., & Prasad, J. (2018). Transfer of training: The known and the unknown. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 5, 201-225. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032117-104443

Govaerts, N., & Dochy, F. (2014). Disentangling the role of the supervisor in transfer of training. Educational Research Review, 12, 77-93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2014.05.002

Grossman, R., & Salas, E. (2011). The transfer of training: What really matters. International Journal of Training and Development, 15(2), 103-120. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2419.2011.00373.x

Holton, E. F., III, Bates, R. A., & Ruona, W. E. A. (2000). Development of a generalized learning transfer system inventory. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 11(4), 333-360. https://doi.org/10.1002/1532-1096(200024)11:4<333::AID-HRDQ2>3.0.CO;2-P

Hom, P. W., Lee, T. W., Shaw, J. D., & Hausknecht, J. P. (2017). One hundred years of employee turnover theory and research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 530-545. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000103

Keller, T., & Alsdorf, K. L. (2012). Every good endeavor: Connecting your work to God's work. Dutton.

Kraimer, M. L., Seibert, S. E., Wayne, S. J., Liden, R. C., & Bravo, J. (2011). Antecedents and outcomes of organizational support for development: The critical role of career opportunities. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(3), 485-500. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021452

Lacerenza, C. N., Reyes, D. L., Marlow, S. L., Joseph, D. L., & Salas, E. (2017). Leadership training design, delivery, and implementation: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(12), 1686-1718. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000241

Rhoades, L., & Eisenberger, R. (2002). Perceived organizational support: A review of the literature. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), 698-714. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.4.698