Intrinsic Workforce Diversity and Construction Worker Productivity in Pakistan: Impact of Employee Age and Industry Experience

Ahsen Maqsoom,Hasnain Mubbasit,Muwaffaq Alqurashi,Bilal Aslam,Iram Shaheen,Alaa Salman,Muhammad Ali Musarat,Wesam Salah Alaloul,Enas E Hussein,Bilel Zerouali

doi:10.3390/su14010232

Abstract

Worker productivity is critical within construction projects as it is the measure of the rate at which work is performed and, more importantly, helps to know how to motivate them to perform at high levels. This research aimed to examine the impact of employee age and industry experience on the intrinsic workforce diversity factors influencing construction worker productivity. Sieving through the previous research and models and theories of analysis, the intrinsic workforce diversity was modeled into the following set of factors, i.e., income, motivation, psychosocial factors, and technical skills. The data were collected by means of a questionnaire survey and examined for the employees having different ages and experiences using the Mann–Whitney U test through SPSS. The results show that employees of varied ages do not concur over motivation-, psychosocial, and technical skills-related workforce diversity factors, whereas employees of varied industrial experiences are in disagreement over some income and motivation related workforce diversity factors. In order to overcome intrinsic workforce diversity, firm support is direly needed for old and mature employees in terms of financial incentives leading to motivation, less supervised scheduling, opportunities for firm advancement, and reporting back every time work is completed. Furthermore, support is required for young employees who are more susceptible due to psychosocial stresses like unevenly distributed work, communication gaps, and technical skills like knowledge of technological equipment and advancement in construction technology which has reduced the skills of workers.

Highlights

With escalating globalization, managing diversity in organizations has turned into a necessarily important issue [1]
This study investigated the impact of workforce diversity factors on worker productivity in the construction industry of Pakistan
The stream of the impact of workforce diversity has been examined from a few perspectives by few researchers

Summary

Introduction

With escalating globalization, managing diversity in organizations has turned into a necessarily important issue [1]. Sustainability 2022, 14, 232 differences yield mixed empirical results on different performance indicators. To make their effects on the performance better understandable, researchers propose a combined analysis of diversity, organizational practices, and different task characteristics. According to Roberge and Van Dick [5], the foremost vital quality of any organization is a heterogeneous workforce that helps mitigate problems, and supplies different and creative ideas with a competitive advantage to the organization, but diversity can bring negative outcomes. It has often been acknowledged that heterogeneity can reduce intragroup coherency and lead to disagreements and misunderstandings which, in turn, can lower employee satisfaction, citizenship behaviors, and increase turnover [6], whereas earlier consensus showed that to have strong positive associations with the perceived group and group satisfaction, openness to linguistic, value, and information diversity is essential

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