Employee motivation in construction companies in Kuwait

Abstract

Kuwait is mentioned as one of the multi-national workplaces. This paper aims to identify the motivational factors that affect employees’ performance in Kuwait construction industry. Many studies conducted regarding motivational factors for construction workers and site engineers, but there is limited research work aimed to identify the motivational factors for construction employees. The Relative Importance Index (RII) was used to rank the motivational factors for different surveyed categories. The study revealed that the most important motivation factors are job security followed by salary and promotion arrangements while taking responsibility is the least motivational factor. The male group of participants chose salary while the female group chose job security. Normal employees chose good relationships with work companions, while managers chose job security as the top-ranked motivational factor. ANOVA test and Spearman correlation analysis were used to analyze the distinguishing difference between different surveyed categories ranking. This analysis concluded that there is no significant correlation between most of the surveyed categories indicating that there is no consensus between study categories regarding motivational factors ranking. This study's result is important to understand motivational factors which can enhance the working environments to improve productivity for the construction industry.