Human Capital Management CRISIS for Indefinite-Term Contract Workers in Local Governments: Focusing on Education & Training and Performance

Abstract

The human resources that make up the local government organizations in Korea can be broadly divided into lo-cal civil servants under the Local Public Officials Act and indefinite-term contract workers and fixed-term workers under the Labor Standards Act. The main purpose of this study is to statistically verify if the education and train-ing provided to indefinite-term contract workers in local government organizations have a positive effect on their performance. In addition, this study performs an empirical analysis on the moderating effect of the variable of feedback of education and training on the relationship between education/training and the performance of the indefinite-term contract workers. As a result of analyzing perception survey data among local government organi-zations' personnel managers, education and training provided to indefinite-term contract workers were found to have a statistically significant positive effect on the workers’ performance. Moreover, feedback of education and training, that is, the level at which result from education and training provided to indefinite-term contract workers reflected in the personnel management showed an effect as a moderating variable that controls the positive rela-tionship between education/training and performance, although not statistically significant. The analysis results of this study have the following importance and expected effects. First, theoretically ex-pected effects of this study; majority of previous studies on the indefinite-term contract workers of local govern-ments were exploratory studies discussing the concept, status, or related regulations of such workers. In contrast, this study contributes to the theoretical expansion of existing studies on the indefinite-term contract workers by providing empirical evidences through quantitative analysis on the relationship between education/training and performance, which is one of the main areas of personnel management. Second, practically expected effects of this study; the positive relationship between education/training and performance of indefinite-term contract workers and moderating effect of the feedback of education and training on the positive relationship make con-tribution to presenting concrete grounds for policy and institutional preparation for the design and operation of education/training programs for indefinite-term contract workers in local governments and linkage between re-sults of education/training and personnel management.