Effectiveness of Motivation towards Job Performance for Employees in Engineering and Construction SME’s In Johor Bahru, Malaysia

Multiple earlier researches on employee job performance have been conducted. Applying similarity on motivation in the earlier research on job performance, this study extends the research by examining the relationships between motivation dimensions and their overall job performance. This research is specifically targeted to determine and investigate the effectiveness of motivational factors of engineering field employees towards their job performance. The study is for the engineering market in Johor Bahru Malaysia; however it is also applicable to most parts of the western regions of Malaysia, as the engineering market in Johor Bahru consists of engineering graduates from all around Malaysia. The motivational factors are also the independent variables of this research such as autonomy, recognition, training, job security, and salary, whereas the dependent variable of the research is as stated the employee job performance. Being a very established study for motivational factors towards job performance, the importance of this research is still existent due to the fact that the change in generation of employees are occurring, thus providing the need for the research. Furthermore, the research done in Malaysia has covered multiple practices and industries but yet has been lacking in the field of engineering and construction. The research is completed with a questionnaire survey that has been distributed and collected with a final total of 74 respondents who fulfilled the criteria of having worked or currently working in Johor Bahru engineering firms. Smart PLS 3 has been then used for the analysis for the data collected, practicing the Partial Least Square, Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) method. From there, it is found that three out of five dimensions which are autonomy, job security, and salary/wage studied were significantly related towards the dependent variable being employee job performance. The other dimension being recognition, shows no significance, and training is almost significant with a minor drop from being accepted as having an impact on employee job performance. In the final chapter, the recommendation from this research is also to have future researchers study and measure the exact depth of salary/wage that an engineering employee might accept to be motivated towards their job performance.