Exploring Leadership Capability Team Leaders for Construction Industry in Malaysia: Training and Experience

Abstract

It has been said that the construction industry must unleash its potential as a source of wealth creation and provide opportunity for the betterment of quality of life. In ensuring the quality of workmanship at construction sites, supervisory skills of site supervisors need to be enhanced. It stressed out that to match business growth and excellence overseas, we must recognize and act on the importance of continuously developing niche expertise and capabilities. Undoubtedly, the role of research in determining the specific leadership skills and the needed core capabilities cannot be over-emphasized. In ensuring the quality of workmanship at construction sites, leadership skills especially supervisory skill for site supervisors need to be enhanced. In this study, quantitative research design with survey questionnaire was used to collect the data and simple random sampling was employed in selecting 248 respondents involving team leaders in construction industry from whole of Malaysia. The data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics; ANOVA in SPSS 21.0. Training and experience in leadership has been found to be significance to leadership capability of team leaders. The opinions from the respondents also indicated that they need the training of leadership and they had to enhance themselves to enable them to become better and more competitive leaders. The results of this assessment can pinpoint the areas needing improvement and therefore can be used as basis in designing and/or deciding development programmes. This study also found that generally the team leaders in construction industry needed more opportunities to expand their leadership capability to become the effective leaders in future.