THE IMPACT OF WORK ENVIRONMENT, SUPERVISION AND JOB SATISFACTION ON EMPLOYEES PRODUCTIVITY

CHAPTER ONE

1.0 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study

The productivity of employees is determined by an inordinate level, on the environment in which they work. Work environment involves all the aspects which act and react on the body and mind of an employee. Under organizational psychology, the physical, mental and social environment where employees are working together and there work to be analyzed for better effectiveness and increase productivity. The major purpose is to generate an environment which ensures the ultimate ease of effort and eliminates all the causes of frustration, anxiety and worry. If the environment is congenial, fatigue, monotony and boredom are minimized and work performance can be maximized. Work has an economic aspect as well as mechanical aspect and it has also psychological aspect. Effective work environment encourage the happier employee with their job that ultimately influence the growth of an organization as well as growth of an economic. The concept of work environment is an actual comprehensive one including the physical, psychological and social aspects that mark up the working condition. Work environment performs to have both positive and negative effects on the psychological and welfare of employees. The work environment can be described as the environment in which people are working. Such as, it is very wide category that incorporates the physical scenery (e.g. noise, equipment, heat), fundamentals of the job itself (e.g. workload, task, complexity) extensive business features (e.g. culture, history) and even extra business background (e.g. industry setting, workers relation).

However all the aspects of work environment are correspondingly significant or indeed appropriate when considered job satisfaction and also affects the welfare of employees? Job satisfaction is an outcome of different factors like pay, promotion, the work itself, supervision, relationships with co-workers and opportunities for promotions (Opkara, 2002). Out of these factors, pay is a very important factor. Frye (2004) found that there is positive relationship between equity based compensation and performance. It was further concluded that compensation plays vital role in human capital intensive firms to attract and retain expert workforce. Furthermore, the compensation has significant impact on the level of job satisfaction of employees. It was also found that flexible compensation has no effect on the level of job satisfaction (Igalens and Roussel, 1999). The study regarding the job satisfaction level of public sector mangers was conducted and it was concluded that the income is the major determinants of job satisfaction (Sokoya, 2000). The investigation about relationship among job satisfaction and pay was conducted and it was also found that job satisfaction is affected by the pay (Nguyen et al., 2003). Brudney and Coundry (1993) have explained different variables that influence performance of the employees in the organization. They included such as pay, organization commitment, relationship between pay and performance, etc.

There are some empirical evidences that there is positive correlation between compensation and performance (Gneezy and Rustichini, 2000; Gardner et al., 2004; Tessema and Soeters, 2006). At the organization level, the essence of any manpower programme is to enhance the welfare of workers by maximizing their skills as well as the quality and quality of their employment opportunity and by so doing add to their economic strength (Nwachukwu ibid). Thus all employee programme are aimed at human resource development and utilization bearing in mind that a well-motivated and satisfied manpower is an asset to an organization, which enhances productivity. In a real sense, three important elements, money, man and material make up any business enterprises. While each of these elements is particularly importance in any organization, it is however the people or the human element that is often responsible for the success of an organization. It is not uncommon to experience a situation where competing firms buy materials in the same market, secure their money from the same sources and employ their personnel in the same area, yet one company emerges as being more productive and profitable than the other. A study of such circumstances more often than not reveals that the difference in the performance is due to the fact that one company has a more “satisfied” work force, hence more productive. With this illustration, people/manpower determine the success of enterprises. Traditionally, when people talk about “supervision” they are usually referring to the managerial or leadership function of overseeing the productivity and progress of employees – typically the employees who report directly to the supervisor. But, Bernard, (2005) defines supervision as the ability of superiors to influence the behavior of subordinates to take a particular course of action. It is the art of influencing people towards achieving organizational goals.

He further clarifies that quality of supervision therefore refers to the effectiveness of the superiors in influencing the behavior of the subordinates in taking a particular course of action. Stemming from their experiences in providing both training and supervision to employees, Rising Sun’s Consultants’ approach to supervision takes a very different perspective; defining supervision more from a coaching and mentoring perspective than from a managerial perspective. They define supervision as a developmental process designed to support and enhance an individual’s acquisition of the motivation, autonomy, self-awareness, and skills necessary to effectively accomplish the job at hand. Productivity can be defined as a measure of the efficiency of a person, machine, factor, system, etc., in converting inputs into useful output ). This study however combines the three variable of work environment, supervision and job satisfaction on the productivity of an employee.

1.2 Statement of the Problem

Job satisfaction is a significant factor in people’s performance at the work place and it influences employee contribution to organization effectiveness and efficiency and therefore, employee perception on the general working environment of their employer is an important step in the realization of organizations objectives. The more a person is satisfied to his or her work, the more likely to find ways of coping, but it has been observed that many employees in Nigeria do not get any feeling of fulfillment or enjoyment from their jobs, this is mostly because of the workload, their boss or the interest of the employee, due to this the employee may not be able to perform as expected. Many employers treat most of their employees like slaves it has been recorded so many times of employers maltreating their employees and also threaten to sack them but due to the problem of unemployment the employee has no option than to endure the torture.