Organisation, Structure and SME Training Provision

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Abstract
DR. DAVID Goss AND DR. ROBERT Jones are both senior lecturers in organisational behaviour at Portsmouth University Business School, England. This paper looks at the issue of training provision within small-and medium-sized firms and suggests that while the United Kingdom evidence appears to indicate relatively poor performance in this respect, it is necessary to recognise the diversity of training provided by SMEs. Such diversity can often be concealed by simple statistical aggregation which may encourage the adoption of training policy initiatives framed in universal terms. Such initiatives are likely to be less than optimally successful as they fail to recognise the variable constraints faced by different types of small firm. To overcome this the authors propose an analysis which links the type of training provision to organisational structure and use survey and interview data to show how organisation structure can affect the potential capacity to provide training. It is concluded that if training provision is to be improved across the spectrum of SMEs, training policy must address these differential capacities.

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