Relationship of individual and organizational factors and employee performance : moderating effects of psychological empowerment in the ceramic tile industry (Abstract and Table of content only)

The Malaysia ceramic tile industry is facing many challenges which include competition from cheap imported tiles from China, increasing costs to procure raw materials as well as the continual increases in natural gas prices, hence causing the production costs to be very high which will have an impact on the industry’s survival. Therefore, one way to boost productivity in order to reduce the labour costs is to have a team of high performing employees. For this reason, this research was initiated to study the factors that could optimize individual employee performance in this industry. Factors that had an influence on employees’ performance in this research were divided into two categories, the first being the independent variables or organisational factors consisting of rewards, procedural justice, organizational culture and psychological empowerment and the second category were the individual factors or demographic factors consisting of employees’ academic background and their tenure at their organizations. Psychological empowerment was also studied to see if it could moderate the relationship between rewards, employees’ academic background and their tenure at their organizations, and employee performance. Based on the factors above, 10 research hypotheses were developed to study their relationships with employee performance. The respondents, totalling 600 employees, were from the supervisory level as they play a significant role in the success or failure of any organization. Questionnaires were given to all respondents and the response rate was 39 %. The completed questionnaires were analysed using SPSS version 20. The results obtained showed that all the independent variables and demographic factors influenced individual employee performance. However, when all the variables were combined together, rewards and employees’ academic background were unable to influence employee performance. The study also found that psychological empowerment did not moderate the relationship between employees’ tenure and their performance. The theoretical implication of this study was that expectancy and goal setting theories were observed by the respondents. The practical implication to employers is that the respondents highlighted the importance of feeling psychologically empowered in order to perform well on their job. The limitation of this study was that it only looked at the supervisory level in the ceramic tile manufacturing sector. Therefore, future research could consider different levels of management and different industries to determine whether if there is any similarity with the results from this study. Besides, this research considered psychological empowerment as a variable and did not study the impact of the four cognitions separately. [ABSTRACT BY AUTHOR

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