Overview Part of an organisation’s competitive armoury is creating and maintaining a highly skilled workforce (see e.g. Grossman and Salas, 2011; Lancaster et al, 2012; Govaerts and Dochey, 2014). However, one of the quandaries that organisations have always faced is how they spend their training budget to ensure that training is transferred to the work environment. Workplace relationships are an integral part of any organisation and express how an organisation’s culture is being lived out on a day-to-day basis (Sias, 2009). Training is a intervention but it is vitally important to understand each stakeholders responsibilities in relation to achieving transfer and how they can effectively work together to realise results. The focus of this paper is to understand how the relationships that exist between various stakeholders affect training transfer. Although it is trainees who will, or will not, transfer the learning to their workplace, we propose that many other stakeholders have a vested interest in transfer taking place and it is vitally important to study their role (Villachica and Stepich, 2010). This paper presents a conceptual model that provides a framework which explores the impact of the key stakeholder relationships on the transfer of training. In doing so it proposes to augment the literature which thus far appears to have neglected to consider how key organisational relationships affect in the transfer process (i.e. trainee, manager and HR professional). Although previous studies have considered the relationship between the trainee and the supervisor (see e.g. Nijman et al, 2006; Scaduto et al, 2008; Govaerts and Dochey, 2014) none have investigated in detail the working of these relationships as a partnership and how they enhance or frustrate successful transfer. The model brings together theories on both transfer and workplace relationships to investigate this gap. In the next section the relevant areas of literature relating to transfer of training is examined. It is important to understand which factors particularly influence transfer and with this in
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