Productivity and the Factors that Influence It - Research Proposal Example

Productivity Table of Contents Productivity Table of Contents 2 Introduction 3 Literature Review 4 Research Design 9 Measures and Scale 9 Questionnaire 10 Data Collection Methods 11 Conclusion 14 Reference 15 Bibliography 15 Introduction Rashid hospital is an organization under the government. The government sector that is in charge of health care in Dubai is called DHA, Dubai Healthcare Authority. The hospital’s history goes back all the way to 1972 when it first established. The hospital was found by His Highness Sheikh Hamdan Bin Rashid AlMaktoum; at the time it was under the health and medical services in Dubai. Nowadays, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid AlMaktoum established the DHA, transferring all governmental hospitals and clinics under the authority. The budget, assets, objectives and missions of Rashid hospital is all under the DHA, along with the other governmental healthcare organizations. The DHA’s objectives are summarized as follows: - Ensuring Health Protection and quality life. - Provide a strategy of healthcare that follow up with the growth of population in Dubai. - Efficiency - Meeting the international standards of healthcare - Ensuring effective regulations and licensing, leading to good quality healthcare. The Mission of the DHA involves: Meeting International Standards Ensuring implementation of a good strategy and policy concerning healthcare. Stimulating growth and innovation in the healthcare market Protection of patient rights and providing safety. Better access to healthcare for the society. The vision of the DHA is to provide benefits for all, better social development and better quality of life. This company has reached a high level of growth which resulted to a great number of employees, consisting of more than 1800 member. Since the Hospital is mainly under Dubai’s government, so most probably the assets such as the land and others are essentially from the government itself. Unfortunately, the company had gone through economical crisis, which forced them to change some rules and to stop hiring people and also cutting off the employees’ payments. The location of the hospital is in Bur Dubai (opposite to AlMaktoum Bridge, behind Dubai Television building). The Research My research will focus on productivity and the factors the influence it. Productivity is a broad variable that contains many sub points that will be discussed later on in the project. Moreover; I will be comparing past reviews and recent surveys that observe and develop a hypothesis on the variables that affect productivity. Literature Review : Going through many articles that involve productivity in organizations, I have reached a conclusion that many variables affect productivity including; trust in leadership, job involvement and incentives. I also chose those variables for there was a past idea of doing this particular research in Rashid Hospital by the Supervisor of quality services in the hospital; he gave me the motivation and the interest to study the field. Moreover; he himself was interested in seeing the results. All of these three variables share a common relationship between them, which is motivation. Motivation is one of the big factors of productivity which will be discussed later. The importances of leadership rely on the satisfaction of the employees and trust in the administration. In addition to that, good leaders provide good systems, which directly affect productivity. Jullie Mille (2004) discusses that good leadership in healthcare makes everybody better off. She emphasized on the trust and satisfaction of employees towards the leaders by suggesting a vote system for employees to get the opportunity to choose their leader. Also, leadership skills provide efficient systems for the organizations; which saves up time and effort, keeping it productive. In the same article mentioned above, she discusses how the new EMR system of attendance made it much easier to track the patients and doctors, which save up costs that were spent on past systems. A challengeable situation concerning leadership is as Harri, Lea and vesa (2009, P.G 385) discussed. The issue involves that whether a leader of an organization should be a senior employee with experience, or leadership skills has nothing to do with experience. The authors state that there is no positive relationship between leadership and experience, moreover; they emphasize on teaching the skills to employees for it is essential in all fields. They add up “Leadership behavior should be a natural performance measurement in order to manage and improve the area”. Clearly, improvement is another factor of productivity. Gary Strack & Myron (2002) discuss an aspect which is the core of leadership. They talk about the spiritual effect of leadership on employees. Although spirituality might seem to many as the same as motivation, personally I see it deeper than that definition. According to the article; many famous authors in human behavior like Wilber and Gibbons agree upon the relationship between effective leadership and its impact on spirituality. The reason why I stated that motivation is different than spirituality is because motivation is one result of spirituality. The term spirituality according to Beazley (1997, 51) is faith relationship with the Transcendent. Being said that, the term has to do with three dimensions: 1. Traditional religions 2. Popular spirituality 3. Organizations behavior towards spirituality The first two points have to do with the individuals and the culture they come from. While the last one is the point where the organization has to be creative and effective in dealing with the differences, but motivating the whole. This is the challenge when it comes to leaders. For instance, if you are in a highly conservative society, you know that faith is a dominant aspect of motivation, which is if a certain work or behavior is said to be good and in relation with ones faith, he will become more involved and motivated to accomplish it. Plus, trust in the organization leadership will increase. From the above information gathered, I predicted that leadership is one essential factor associated with productivity that is when there is good leadership, there is trust from employees, leading to productivity. Either because the systems are satisfactory, spirituality is increased or the fact that employees do have an opinion regarding their leader. The other factor is job involvement. Job involvement particularly has to do with the suitable environment for the employees. Providing employees with the proper work environment makes the employee more job oriented. Caring less about this matter leads to de-motivation, hatred of the job and finally high number of turnover. Those three factors are negatively related to productivity. I concluded from this, theoretically, that job involvement increases productivity with a triple factor instead of a factor of one. Job involvement is potentially very important to organizational success (Rabinowitz, Hall, and Goodale 1977; Rabinowitz and Hall 1981). People with high job involvement have little reason to leave the job (Lambert, Vol 13 P.G 1, 2009). In order to increase job involvement and thus increase productivity; the organization should be aware of several factors. First of all a suitable environment, in cases of healthcare it involves administrative staff as well as doctors. For instance, giving right tasks to the right persons. In cases of doctors, some doctors work as on calls at night shifts, which is mainly helpful. The negative side of this is that it may cause some doctors to look after emergency cases that are not in their field. Personally, I have experienced that in a hospital, and it caused me to distrust the place. Another factor is opening the chance in front of the employees to reach the higher management. This would increase Job involvement through recommendations and new creative ideas that may lead to a better environment at work (Jane McCusker, 2005). The last factor that is associated with productivity is incentives. Incentives can include: 1. Incentive Programs 2. Daily incentives 3. Vacations 4. Privileges (Passios, P.G 18 2009) Mentions that daily incentives can lead to better attendance in the organization. Also, he says that devising an incentive program should involve all staff from all levels. This means that each employee form each level is motivated with a certain type of incentive that triggers his productivity. An employee would not attend if he is not convinced with the work he is enrolled in. Therefore; we can predict that daily incentives are an effective factor for productivity, given the psychological factors associated with incentives. First of all, when incentives are given, a sense of good will and good payback is present within an employee towards the company. Secondly, when all are given incentives, employees’ sense of negative comparing becomes less (Scott, 2005). Concerning privileges, some employees should be given a sense of freedom in their work. For example, senior staff who are known of their productive career throughout their work life should be given privileges. Others like loyal staff who spent a decade, two or more in the organization should feel that they are appreciate it. During an interview with a consultant who spent 30 years in Rashid hospital, I got to discuss with him this particular matter. Dr. Ustadi, the consultant, stated that it is his right get flexible hours of work without any interference from any administrator. His argument was that this is the least thing he deserves through out his career. Other staff may ask for other things like more payment, each one has his own incentive that he co with. Thus, it is the administration or leadership’s job to listen and benefit that group of people. In Dr. Ustadi’s case, the argument that I support his idea with is that if he arrives early when he does not want to, he might spend the first hours frustrated, less job involved. While as a senior staff, he has enough experience to know the time that fits him the most. Therefore arriving an hour or two late with more productivity is the priority. In addition to that, if the hospital offers that, this will increase his morale towards his work as will be shown later on. Other staff I met in the hospital complains about many vacations that are not in celebrations. They asked for vacations in celebrations and less in the rest of the days, claiming that they will be more job involved in terms of taking a good break and coming back to work. In conclusion, Incentives have a strong positive relation with productivity. Incentives should be studied carefully to get everyone in the organization better off. After gathering all the information on these variables, I came up with a theoretical framework that summarize and state my research’s core study. Theoretical framework Incentives Job Involvement -------> Productivity Trust in Leadership After gathering the information and developing my theoretical framework, I have derived three hypotheses regarding my research: 1. H1: The more the trust in leadership, the more the productivity 2. H2: The higher the job involvement, the greater the productivity. 3. H3: There is a positive relationship between Incentives and productivity. Research Design - Purpose of Study: It is hypotheses testing (Explanatory). This is because I am trying to observe the relationship between the variables. - Type of investigation: It is a correlation study. The reason is that the factors are associated with productivity, the dependent variable. - Extent of interference: My extent of interference will be minimal, for I will collect data concerning productivity without any involve in the organizational activity. - Study setting: My study setting is field, since I am doing a correlation investigation that does not interfere with the activities of the Hospital. - Unit of Analysis: My unit of anaylsis will be indivuals. That is because it concenrns there respones towards the indepenedt variables and how it affects them. - Time Horizon: Time horizon is cross-sectional for the reason that I will collect data at one point in a time. I will interview and survey the staff once. Measures and Scale The hospital has staff strength of 1800. In order to carry out a research work to find out how the productivity of a typical employee is affected through trust in leadership, job involvement and incentives, a questionnaire was prepared and asked to be filled up by 100 employees being chosen at random. On the basis of their responses, a correlation analysis using Pearson Correlation Coefficient was made to test for the validity of each of the hypotheses being framed in the previous section. Before presenting the results, however, it is necessary to present the questionnaire being prepared for the purpose. Questionnaire The questionnaire would be prepared in a way so as to cover all aspects expected to be significantly affecting the productivity of the employees in a healthcare unit like the Rashid Hospital in Dubai. In general three factors have been identified so far in this regard. Hence, the pattern of the questionnaire would be such as to test the existence of these factors in the present case. The questionnaire presented before the staff employed at Rashid Hospital is as follows. Trust in Leadership What are the preferences of the people regarding the mode of choosing their leaders? How effectively does the organisation attend to employee grievances? How efficient is the healthcare system in the organisation? How attentive are the doctors and nurses to their patients? Are regular training and skill enhancement programs held in the hospital for the privilege of its staff? What is the tentative propensity of getting healed, among patients? Job Involvement How extreme is the level of specialisation in job at the hospital? How secure do the employees feel about their jobs? Do the employees feel stressed out at the end of the day? How supportive is the management to its employees and how cordial is the relation that they share? (Gallie, White, Cheng & Tomlinson, 1998) What are the modes through which the employee circle can reach the top management in the hospital with their appeals? Are the employees satisfied with the reimbursements which they earn? What are the ways the hospital usually adopts to punish a non-abiding employee? How smooth is the level of communication between the staff and the management in the hospital? Incentives Are there any incentive programs where the employees are enrolled? Are there any arrangements for daily incentives? If yes, are the employees satisfied with them? What is the sufficiency of the vacations arranged for the employees? What is the flexibility with which the staff can accomplish their jobs? Is there any privilege of entertainment programs being arranged in the honour of the employees? If yes, what is their frequency of occurrence? Data Collection Methods The above questionnaire was asked to be completed by randomly chosen 100 employees among the hospital staff, with each getting a chance only once. Most of the questions demanded a subjective answer, though there were some which were objective in nature as well. The responses of the employees being selected to participate in the survey has been presented in the appendix to the paper. Since the responses were mostly logical in nature, the answers of the participants have been captured in the form of dummy variables, where a positive answer is implied by ‘1’ and a negative answer by ‘0’. The results of the correlation analysis being run between the variables on the basis of the observations are shown below. Productivity and Trust in Leadership Productivity Mode of Selection Attend employee grievances Doctors and Nurses Regularity of training programs Propensity of patient recovery Productivity 1.000 Mode of Selection .312 1.000 Attend employee grievances .186 -.247 1.000 Doctors and Nurses .126 .259 .261 1.000 Regularity of training programs .161 .408 .161 .117 1.000 Propensity of patient recovery .523 .049 .381 .047 .000 1.000 From the output table above it is clear that in all the level of productivity is found to display a positive relationship with the amount of trust that the employees have on their leadership. In fact, the feeling about the recovery of patients among the employee, are found to be positively related with productivity with a 99% confidence.1 Thus, overall, it could be said that the variable ‘trust in leadership’ indeed has a positive relationship with the level of productivity found among the employees. Productivity and Job Involvement Product. Job Security Strain at work Supportive environment Satisfaction with reimbursement Punish Communi cation with the management Productivity 1.000             Job Security -.357 1.000           Strain at work -.027 -.027 1.000         Supportive environment .110 -.027 .028 1.000       Satisfaction with reimbursemnt .015 -.132 -.386 -.238 1.000     Punish .493 -.457 .027 .302 -.308 1.000   Communicatn with the management -.050 .086 -.247 .165 .132 -.086 1.000 The influence of job involvement on productivity is found to display a mixed result. Some factors that decide the job involvement of employees are found to be negatively related to productivity, while some others are found to be positively related. However, the punishment factor is found to display a strong positive correlation with the level of productivity, implying that, higher the fear among the employees of getting punished, the greater will their productivity be. Thus the hypothesis regarding the relation of the level of productivity with the factor ‘job involvement’ is found to be true in some aspect, while it is proved false in some others. Productivity and Incentives Productivity Satisfaction with incentives Vacations Productivity 1.000 Satisfaction with incentives -.261 1.000 Vacations .086 .396 1.000 From the above table it is clear that the amount of incentives that the employees earn is negatively related with their productivity levels, though the number of vacations which they get has a very feeble positive relation with the same. Similar to the above case, the null hypothesis regarding the correlation with productivity level of employees and the factor ‘Incentives’ are found to be true in case of greater number of vacations’ but false in the case of satisfaction with higher incentives. Conclusion As far as a theoretical analysis is concerned, all the factors considered above are found to be significant determinants of the productivity levels among employees in any organisation. However, from the empirical analysis carried out in the previous section to test the same, it is clear that theory regarding the factors affecting the productivity level of the employees is only partially satisfied in case of Rashid Hospital. But a point which must be noted in this regard is that none of the statistics are significant, implying that the difference in the empirical results with theory are owed to sampling fluctuations more than a violation of theory. These fluctuations could be corrected either through increasing the number of observations or by choosing another sample with the same size and from the same population. Again, there could be some other probable factors underlying the factors - trust, incentives or the quotient of job involvements among the employees, which might have been overlooked and if reconsidered would yield a more appropriate and matching result. Reference Gallie, D., White, M., Cheng, Y. & Tomlinson, M. (1998) Restructuring the employment relationship. New York: OUP. Bibliography Babbie, E. R. (2009) The practice of social research. USA: Cengage. Read More