CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1  BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

The organizations today consider employees as their top most priority. A lot of effort is put in order to attain, retain and motivate them. The traditional role is an employee is no more effective and the organizations are finding new ways of working.    The key to organizational success is the competitive workforce. The organizations strive hard to align organizational strategies and objectives with employee’s behaviours in order to stay competitive. The way in which employee accomplish organizationally set goals and relate their interpersonal behaviours to the organizational norms can be termed as employee performance.

Factors of workplace environment play an important role towards the employee’s performance. The factors of workplace environment give an immense impact to the employee’s performance either towards the negative outcomes or the positive outcomes (Chandrasekar, 2001). Over the last decades, the factors of work environment of the office workers had changed due to the changes in several factors such as the social environment, information technology and the flexible ways of organizing work processes (Hasun and Maklibug, 2005).

A lot of past research has been devoted towards the concept of employee performance. Employee performance was found to be related to a number of factors including conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness and emotional stability. Environment literally means surroundings and all those things that impact human being during the life time are collectively known as environment. A working environment is the environment where people work together for achieving organization objectives. It means, systems, processes, structures and tools and all those things which interact with employees and affect in positive or negative ways on employees performance. It can also be defined as the location where a task is completed. When studying place of employment, the work environment involves the physical geographical location as well as the immediate surroundings of the workplace such as a construction size or office buildings.

According to boles et al (2004), which the employee’s are physically and emotionally have the desire to work. Then their performance outcomes shall be increased. Moreover, they also stated that by having a proper workplace environment. It helps in reducing the number of absenteeism and thus can increase the employees performance which will leads to the increasing number of productivity at the workplace. Referring to this matter, research need to be done in order to identify the main contributor to the employees performance and investigate on how the workplace environment in term of the job aid, supervisor support or relationship and physical work environment affect employees performance at the workplace.

The concepts of “workplace performance” means the factors of workplace that is being provided by the employers to their employees that could support the employees performance at work (Clements-Croome, 2006). By having a high level performance of employees, it will increase the company’s profit.

The workplace environment in a majority of ministry is unsafe and unhealthy. These includes poorly designed workstations, unsuitable furniture, lack of ventilation, inappropriate lighting, excessive noise, insufficient safety measures in fire emergencies and lack of personal protective equipment. People working in such environment are prone to occupational disease and it impacts thus reflect on employee’s performance. Hence, productivity is decreased due to the workplace environment.

1.2  Statement of the Problem

The study was conducted to find out how employee’s performance can be increased by developing a conducive working environment. The problems of inadequate working environment coupled with how performance of workers in ministries is receiving increased serious attention in the state. Some of the reviewed studies done in the Akwa Ibom State Civil Service Commission have looked at workers performance and working environment factors with limited information on the role of working environment and performance of worker especially focusing on how working environment affect the availability, competence, productivity and responsiveness combine as they affect elements of performance in the commission.

However, when there is a strong overturn of employee’s expectation on a workplace environment, the performance of such workers are inadequate. Thus, they are not motivated to put in their best.

It is on this note; this research is being designed to address major issues confronting employees in their work environment. The study will also be interested in suggesting some solving measure on how to create and maintain a work environment that can bring out the best performance from employees to boost organizational growth.

1.3  Objectives of the Study

The main aim of this study is to examine the effect of work environment on employee’s performance. To be precise, the research paper would seek to fulfill the below listed objectives:

• To establish the relationship between work environment and employee’s performance.
• To analyze workplace factors affecting the employees performance
• To examine whether a good work environment can enhance excellent employee’s performance
• To suggest the measures to improve the working conditions for better performance.
• To recommend solution to situations where work environment affect employee’s performance.

1.4  Research Questions

For a meaningful research to be conducted, the following questions related to the study were asked:

• Do workers who work in a conductive working environment perform better than those who work in an hazardous working environment?
• To what extent does workplace factors influenced employee’s performance?
• Can a good work environment bring out the best performance from employees?
• To what extent does an improved work environment affect employee’s performance?

1.5  Research Hypotheses

To answer the question above in section 1.4 more accurately which satisfy the objective of the research work, the following statement of hypotheses are set up as a guide to this research work.

The null hypothesis is denoted as “Ho” while the alternative hypothesis is denoted as “H1”.

• Hypothesis One:

Ho: A good work environment does not bring out the best performance from employees.

H1: A good work environment brings out the best performance from employees.