FACTORS AFFECTING JOB OUTCOMES OF FACILITIES MANAGEMENT WORKERS

Abstract

Facilities Management (FM) workers form the essential labour backbone of the FM industry. In recent years, the supply of low skilled workforce has been shrinking, presenting an issue to the labour intensive FM companies. There is a need to improve the job outcomes of FM workers. This is addressed with the aim of this dissertation, which is to determine the relationship between job characteristics and work outcomes, such that a better job design can be implemented to boost their job satisfaction. It was hypothesized that increase in the extent of job characteristics can lead to similar increase in job outcomes for FM workers. The objectives are: (i) investigate factors affecting job outcomes amongst FM workers, (ii) investigate the job characteristics of FM workers, (iii) identify factors that contribute significantly to job outcomes amongst FM workers and lastly, (iv) propose recommendations to improve job satisfaction levels of FM workers. A comprehensive literature review was conducted and a structured questionnaire was developed from it, after which questionnaire data were collected through one-to-one sessions with FM workers and subsequently analyzed with the SPSS software, using one sample t-test and Spearman‟s correlation. Findings show that 24 out of 31 job characteristics are correlated with job outcomes, while 4 out of 6 job outcomes significantly present and observed amongst FM workers, confirming the hypothesis. Internal work motivation level, quality of job performance, and level of job satisfaction was found to be positively correlated with each other, these factor also had the highest number of associations with job characteristic factors. Additionally, turnover intention and level of stress were also found to be positively correlated with each other. Recommendations were made based on the findings, which involved boosting job characteristics that yield positive impacts, but are not currently present. They are: Sense of accomplishment (X7), empowerment for decisions and negotiations (X8), opportunities for further training and upgrade (X15), and job stability (X16). Recommendations were also given for job characteristics that had a significant number of correlations with job outcomes, they are: Opportunities to make friends (X22), and sufficient role clarity (X26).