Do Human Care and Knowledge Management Practices Really Matter in Determining Worker Productivity? Perceptions of Supervisory Level Employees in Tea Plantation Sector in Sri Lanka

A T Gamage,W P R Wickramaratne

doi:10.4038/kjhrm.v15i1.71

Abstract

The tea industry is still one of the dominant industries in Sri Lanka due to its vast impact on the economic and socio-cultural environment. However, this significance is gradually declining mainly because of lowering worker productivity. This current study explored whether the decreasing productivity in Sri Lankan Tea industry can be turned around and sustained by implementing human care and knowledge management practices that enhance tea estate workers' quality of life and quality of work life. Un-structured interviews with a random sample of 75 supervisory level managers of well-established tea plantation companies reported that a range of human care and knowledge management practices contribute to enhance worker productivity via enhanced quality of life and quality of work life. The findings provide implications to the social exchange and psychological contract theories whereas policy makers should implement proposed knowledge management and human care practices for enhancing the worker productivity.

Highlights

Being the largest tea exporter with average revenue of 15 billion USD in the year 2015, Tea industry in Sri Lanka plays a significant role in country’s economy with a contribution of approximately 4.2% to the Gross Domestic Production (GDP) and foreign exchange earnings (Central Bank of Sri Lanka, 2018; Gamage & Wickramaratne, 2019)
Managers from most junior to senior level stressed that the identified key human care and knowledge management practices are the best to enhance the worker productivity levels in tea plantation industry in Sri Lanka
Results were further verified through the interviews responses of different layers of executive and managerial personals in tea industry who revealed that that the motivated and highly engaged workers stimulated from best human care and knowledge management practices are producing more quantitative and qualitative outputs in terms of intake per harvester, yield per hectare per worker and quality of green tea leaves harvested

Summary

Introduction

Being the largest tea exporter with average revenue of 15 billion USD in the year 2015, Tea industry in Sri Lanka plays a significant role in country’s economy with a contribution of approximately 4.2% to the Gross Domestic Production (GDP) and foreign exchange earnings (Central Bank of Sri Lanka, 2018; Gamage & Wickramaratne, 2019). Sri Lanka is currently experiencing a loss of its dominance in the world market due to various reasons out of which strong competition and low worker productivity are the more significant factors. Deraniyagala, Dassanayake and Karunarathna, 2017) ) and decreasing competitiveness in the global tea market (Perera, 2017; Hilal, 2020). In this context, Sri Lanka has become the country with the lowest productivity compared to major competitors such as Kenya and India (Gamage & Wickramaratne, 2019). As a high labor intensive industry (Gamage & Wickramaratne, 2019; Silva, 2018) RPCs need to change its traditional land and labor usage and management models to enable RPCs to solve the current crisis of tea industry, especially low productivity (Perera, 2017; Koththagoda & Dissanayake, 2017)

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Discussion

Conclusion