Biographical factors affecting the labour productivity

Lal FONSEKA

Last week our attention was drawn on age and discussed at length as to how it affects the labour productivity and today we will focus on the other biographical factors which affect the same.

Gender

When one raises a question to find out as to whether women perform as well on jobs men do, obviously different answers will form in the minds of employers. Frankly this is not an easy question to answer. When trying to find answers, this issue initiate more debates, misconceptions, unsupported opinions. This is a serious subject which warrants the careful analysis. In reality, are there any important differences between men and women that will affect their job performance?

Psychological studies have found that women are more willing to confirm to authority and men are more aggressive. The literature with respect to the relationship between gender and labour productivity is inconsistent. Some studies report that women have higher job satisfaction in turn the improved labour productivity, whereas other studies find that men are more satisfied, yet some other studies find no significant difference between the genders.

A research done in 2003 found that women's satisfaction has declined substantially in the past decade, whereas men's job satisfaction has remained fairly constant. When it applies to Sri Lanka, in my view satisfaction of both gender categories have declined in the past decade. In a developing country like ours, most people come to work mainly to earn their own bread and butter. A woman who works in an apparel factory said in an interview that she comes to work mainly because of her small daughter.

What she tried to convince me was that she is unable to fulfill her daughter's requirements only with the money her husband earns.

In fact, she was keeping the picture of her daughter in front of the office table she works. She further told me that her morale goes up every time she looks at the picture of the daughter. At the end of the interview, I saw big drops of tears coming down her face. As per a recent research done, about 2.8 to 3.0 million females are employed in Sri Lanka which amounts to about 14% of the total population of the country.

According to another research done by me, female employees demonstrated higher levels of labour productivity not through job satisfaction but through fear.

They had a fear that they will lose their employment if they do not perform better than their male counterparts across most work settings. This is proved by the research done by Al-Mashaan, 2003 and he indicated that male employees in comparison to female employees report higher levels of job satisfaction. This, he attributes to the better chances for employment men are argued to have, and opportunities to advance in their jobs at a more rapid pace than females.

However, another point I would like to stress that women are inclined to be less satisfied in their jobs because they tend to hold positions at lower levels in the organizational hierarchy where pay and promotion prospects are less attractive. Numerous studies across a variety of occupational settings have, however, found no significant gender differences in job satisfaction, despite the fact that women on average have inferior jobs in terms of pay, status, level of authority, and opportunities for promotion.

Various theories have emerged to account for what has often been referred to as the paradox of the contented working woman. One of the most popular explanations is that men and women attach value to different aspects of the job. In addition to placing greater emphasis on co-worker relations, women are also more inclined to assign priority to work that provides them with a sense of accomplishment (Tolbert & Moen, 1998). Furthermore, women may compare themselves only with other women or with women who stay at home rather than with all other employees (Hull, 1999).

Tenure refers to the length of time for which the individual has worked for the organization and quite few researches indicate that employees with longer tenure have a greater propensity to be satisfied with their jobs than employees with shorter tenure. In my case, I worked for a certain employer for nearly 20 years continuously mainly due to the fact that I had fair job satisfaction with this employer. Moreover, it is an established fact that employees with longer tenure were more satisfied with their work itself as well as their level of pay.

From this it might be concluded that satisfaction increases with time and that those benefits that increase in time, such as security and experience, are likely to have an important influence on employee satisfaction.

On the other hand, anyone could argue that an inverse relationship exists between tenure and job satisfaction.

The reason the literature is both inconsistent and inconclusive in this regard may be because the relationship between these variables depends on the specific organization and how tenure is viewed. In some organizations of Sri Lanka, senior employees are highly respected, while high tenure is viewed as a liability in other organizations.

Marital Status and labour productivity

Workers are the most important asset in any organization and thus a successful and highly productive company can be achieved by winning them in improving their performance. All workers are not alike in their working and they have dissimilar modes of working for instance some have highest capability despite of the incentive however other might have occasional jump-start. There are numerous factors which can be affecting the employees' productivity. Every employee may have dissimilar effect from diverse things at workplace. Numerous factors have been shown to make a difference in the productivity, although marital status has been overlooked.

A happy marriage has been established to have an extraordinarily helpful impact on the work or profession of individuals. One entrepreneur told that a happy marriage increases the level of an employee's productivity.

Men and women base their self-esteem on accomplishment in the workplace. But, the feeling of happiness comes from the value of their marriage relationship. Marriage needs hard work and big sacrifices; however a great marriage as well requires intense effort. Many people see divorce as the way out, which is not.

Another study done by me over 20 couples that divorced, found that two years later fifteen of the individuals alleged they made the wrong conclusion. This effect of divorce and the secondary consequences are evidently demonstrated in the relation of the individuals at the workplace thus consequently affecting their productivity.

This is why in certain organizations, before the recruitment of married people into their service, HR person talks to the couple for about 15 minutes to ascertain as to whether they are living in peace under one roof. In this instance, HR in my opinion tries to apply 3 R's effectively. (Right person, Right Time and Right Place)

Race

Race is a controversial issue. It can be so contentious that it is tempting to avoid the topic. However, it is the view of Stephen Robbins (a well-known author of Organizational Behaviour), without discussion of race, a complete picture of individual differences in OB is incomplete (Robbins, 2010).

Race has been studied a quite bit in OB, particularly as it relates to employment outcome such as personnel selection decisions, performance evaluation, pay, and work place discrimination.

In employment settings, there is a tendency for individuals to favour colleagues of their own race in performance evaluations, promotion decisions, and pay raises. There are substantial racial differences in attitudes towards affirmative action, with African Americans approving of such programs to a greater degree than white.

African American generally fares worse than white in employment decisions. For example, African American receives lower rating in employment interviews, is paid less, and is promoted less frequently.

Herein Sri Lanka too, White skins are receiving better treatments than our own people despite the fact that our people has the better qualifications and experience than these expat officers. Only justifiable answer our employers could bring in favour of this decision is the negative attitudes of our people. In most organizations, these European expatiate officers are treated with massive packages, but Sri Lankan employees with the same qualification or sometimes even better are paid lesser packages driving them to frustration, thereby lower productivity.

The major dilemma faced by employers who use mental ability tests for selection, promotion, training and similar personnel decisions is concern that they may have a negative impact on Labour Productivity.

Proximity

Proximity is an invitation to interrupt somebody. And interruption is the biggest enemy of productivity. When everyone is sitting together, everyone's at the same desk or nearby interruption takes place. It's really easy to shout something over to somebody or tap someone on the shoulder or whatever. That can be useful at times, no doubt. But for the most part, it's interruption.

Lateness

Employees who do not report at their work sites at the scheduled time are late. Each late attendance regardless of whether it is at the beginning of the scheduled work day or upon return from lunch, is an unauthorized lateness. It was revealed in various researches that there is variety of reasons for chronic lateness, such as job dissatisfaction, promotional or salary-related resentments, or a lax company policy. However, my research has also found that most chronically late people aren't purposefully tardy but instead tend to have difficulty with time management.

During the past three to five years, lateness has gradually been on the decline in Sri Lankan businesses. But in school sector it is on the rise. Many managers cited decreasing employee morale and increasing work and family responsibilities as causes for the lateness. With the recent economic turmoil, employees are feeling more stress and pressure to take on extra workloads, according to the survey participants. These factors, coupled with a loosening of societal standards, are causing some real changes in priorities.

Almost all employers in Sri Lanka do record staff lateness as this problem is costing them hundreds of hours in lost productivity. Certain employers had introduced disciplinary and monitoring measures to tackle the issue, as they have found employee lateness to be a matter of great irritation. In an organization, certain manager indicated that certain employees are regularly getting late and some have been late more than 08 times a month. It is needless to mention that lateness will decrease labour productivity.

Number of dependents

Many times employees report absence because of events or conditions that are beyond their control. It is estimated that 40 % of absenteeism is unavoidable. One such unavoidable event is when employees' children suddenly become ill and they have to report an unauthorized absence even without pay. Absenteeism is the biggest headache in the apparel industry in Sri Lanka. Some industries of this nature take a lot of remedial actions to get away from these unproductive and unfortunate situations by paying incentives and other monetary benefits.

Many employers having understood the seriousness of this dependants' issue have invested in after-care and day-care facilities for their dependents. In a certain factory in Koggala, female employees after enjoying their maternity leave come to work with their newly born babies as this factory has provided a day-care facility with some modern facilities.

The reason behind in providing this facility is that they found that employees with small children between the ages 0-6 years reported higher rates of absence than those with older children. A logical explanation, according to Robbins et al. (2003), is that when a small child is ill, parents would normally stay home to either take them to a doctor or place them in someone else's care. Though the researcher talked about the relationship of number of children and the absenteeism, there is no doubt when the absenteeism is high on any organization, it will affect the labour productivity.

Religion and labour productivity

Religion is a touchy subject. Not only do religious and non-religious people question each other's belief system, often people of different religious faith conflict. As a result, it will affect the labour productivity. Since it is a very sensitive topic to discuss among the employees of the Sri Lankan culture, my natural feeling is to eliminate this topic from our discussion.

With this article, we will have a full stop to this topic and we will meet up next week with another exhilarating article on a different subject.