Impact of employee development in agricultural companies on commitment, loyalty and performance

Abstract

Employees in agricultural companies are aware of the necessity to learn and develop; hence it is essentially easier for the agricultural companies to encourage their employees to engage in these processes. Regardless the awareness of the employees concerning the development, the organisational features of the agricultural companies, which influence the development of the employees, needs to be taken into account. The aim of the paper is to identify the attitude of surveyed agriculture organisations towards employee development and to evaluate possible use of employee development strategies impacting employee commitment, loyalty and performance. Data were collected by means of quantitative research in selected number of agricultural companies (n=101) in the Czech Republic, while the data were evaluated by descriptive (correlation) analysis and multidimensional statistics (factor analysis). Results show that employee development foster commitment, loyalty and performance. The results were able to classify the HR systems of the case organisations into six types according to factor analysis: external HR marketing, internal development, investments into development, increased loyalty and competitiveness, increased understanding and finally, increased retention based on loyalty and commitment. Furthermore, smaller companies often lack formal development. On the contrary, large and micro companies have exact practices and outputs related to it.