Demotivating factors influencing rubber production workers

Article history: Received June 15, 2011 Received in Revised form August, 22, 2011 Accepted 25 August 2011 Available online 26 August 2011 Motivation is one of the most important factors influencing workers' productivity. An increase in workers' motivation could add more value to organizations' structure and influence the profitability, significantly. In this paper, we study different factors on demotivating workers using questionnaire consist of various questions. The questionnaire is distributed among some employees who work for rubber production units located in Esfahan, Iran. The results of this survey indicate that discrimination on annual job compensation, entrusting responsibilities and unpleasant relationship with family partner are some of the most important factors influencing employees' motivation. While financial factors play important role on increasing employees' motivation, non-financial factors are considered more important. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
Motivation plays an important role on increasing firms' productivity and profitability.There have been virtually tremendous efforts on increasing workers' motivation through providing promotion programs, entertainment, salary hike, etc.There are, however, several hidden factors influencing workers' motivation, which need to be determined.A comprehensive study on detecting such factors could help managers reduce their influences using different techniques (Opsahl & Dunnette 1996;Gällstedt , 2003;Tremblay et al., 2009).NG et al. (2004) investigated negative factors influencing the productivity of civil engineering projects.They improved worker productivity by identifying factors demotivating factors by indentifying the factors through an empirical survey in Hong Kong.The results of their survey indicated that time losses due to demotivation to be as much as 13.6 manhours/week, with material availability, overcrowded work areas and rework being the most significant demotivators involved.Delfgaauw and Dur (2007) provided a method for signaling and screening of workers' motivation.In their work, they developed a model in which workers are heterogeneous in their intrinsic motivation to work at a factory.They characterized optimal incentive schemes and examined how the firm could attract and select highly motivated workers to fill a vacancy when workers' motivation was private information.They reported that although higher wage increases the likelihood of filling the vacancy, it decreases the expected average quality of job applicants because less motivated workers were induced to apply.
De Lange et al. (2010) proposed a method for dominant achievement goals of older workers and their relationship with motivation-related outcomes.They concentrated on older employees' achievement motivation by studying the prevalence of dominant achievement goals among a "unique" group of 172 Dutch workers who remained active after their post-statutory retirement age.In addition, they studied how their dominant achievement goals were linked to motivation-related outcomes such as work engagement and meaning of work.They reported that, relative to younger workers, a significantly higher amount of older workers endorsed dominant mastery-avoidance goals.In addition, older workers with dominant mastery-approach objectives scored highest, while the workers with dominant mastery-avoidance goals scored lowest in work engagement, social and personal meaning of work.Linz analyzed the difference between age and gender among Russian workers by proposing two hypotheses.First, Linz found that worker motivation would be positively correlated with organizational commitment, where organizational commitment was captured by a series of statements associated with the employee's perception of their workplace and the satisfaction expressed about the workplace and job.Second, Linz reported that worker motivation was positively correlated to the expectation that a desired reward would be received in exchange for doing the job well.Lan et al. (2010) presented an empirical study for evaluating the effects of air temperature on office workers' well-being, workload and productivity with subjective ratings.They reported that the warm discomfort negatively affected participants' well-being and increased the ratio of low frequency (LF) to high frequency (HF) of HRV.In the moderately uncomfortable environment, the workload imposed by tasks increased and participants had to exert more effort to maintain their performance and they also had lower motivation to do work.Mak and Sockel (2001) presented a confirmatory factor analysis of IS employee motivation and retention.They investigated IS employees' motivation and intent to remain using structural equation modeling.They showed that latent motivation has an impact on latent retention, with job satisfaction and perceptions of management on career development as indicator variables for the former, and burnout, loyalty, and turnover intent as indicator variables for the latter through a survey conducted among existing IS employees.Zakeri et al. (1997) studied factors affecting the motivation of Iranian construction operatives.They reported that the four most important motivation factors of Iranian construction operatives are, in descending order: "fairness of pay", "incentive and financial rewards", "on-time payment" and "good working facilities" and suggested that construction managers would have to be sensitive to these factors in order to sustain the drive for higher construction productivity.
In this paper, we present an empirical study to assess the negative factors influencing motivation on people who work for rubber industry.The present study designs a questionnaire, which consist of various questions and distributed among employees.The responses were gathered and analyzed to detect the important factors.This paper is organized as follows.We first present the organization of this paper first presents the structure of the survey in section 2 and details of the results are given in section 3. Finally, concluding remarks are given in the last section to summarize the contribution of this paper.

Problem statement
The proposed model of this paper uses Likert (1932) based scale from one to five to receive feedback from 20 despondences who participated in our survey.Table 1 shows details of some of the most important questions along with the frequencies and percentages of the despondences.In Table 1, the response along with weighted mean is shown for each question.As we can observe from Table 1, the lack of personal equipment with 85% plays the most important role on people's performance and the annual reward has the least impacting factor on the performance of employees.Table 2 explains other relative questions along with responses in Likert based.As we can observe from Table 2, the maximum weighted mean is 4.32 for discrimination on annual job compensation; the next maximum weighted mean is 4.12, which is associated with entrusting responsibilities and unpleasant relationship with family partner.There are other important factors affecting working performance such as unpleasant working condition, lack of job promotion, no change on working conditions, discrimination on applying laws, etc. Next section, we examine the hypotheses associated with our proposed study.

The results
In this section, we present the results our survey for examining different hypotheses.The first and the main question of the survey is as follows, Q1.Can we improve work performance of employees by removing demotivating factors?
Table 3 shows the summary of our survey in terms of the average score, frequency, percentage and accumulated scores.The average number is 3.25 with the standard deviation of 0.68.As we can observe we can reach a valid t-student under 5% significance level, which means the null hypothesis associated with the main question of our survey is rejected and we can conclude that removing the barriers could increase employees' motivations.The other question is that whether removing financial demotivating factors could increase employees' motivation and the responses are summarized in Table 4 as follows, The average number is 2.04 with the standard deviation of 1.68.As we can observe we can reach a valid t-student under 5% significance level, which means the null hypothesis associated with the second question of our survey is rejected and we can conclude that removing financial barriers could increase employees' motivations.Another question is that whether removing non-financial demotivating factors could increase employees' motivation and the responses are summarized in Table 5 as follows, The average number is 3.32 with the standard deviation of 0.67.As we can observe we can reach a valid t-student under 5% significance level, which means the null hypothesis associated with the third question of our survey is rejected and we can conclude that removing non-financial barriers could increase employees' motivations.The last question is whether financial demotivating factors have more influence on employees' motivation compared with non-financial demotivating factors.Table 6 summarizes the summary of our survey.As we can observe from the results of Table 6, t-student is meaningful under 5% significance level, which means the removing non-financial barriers could better increase employees' motivation than financial barriers.In summary, since the survey in performed in a country with more spirituality background, we can conclude that people do care about what is happening in their social working environment than other financial issues.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have studied various factors on demotivating workers using questionnaire consist of various questions.The questionnaire was distributed among some employees who worked for rubber production units located in Esfahan, Iran.The results of this survey indicated that discrimination on annual job compensation, entrusting responsibilities and unpleasant relationship with family partner are most important factors influencing employees' motivation.The survey also showed that while financial factors was important on increasing employees' motivation, non-financial factors are considered more important.

Table 1
Feedback responses from despondences in terms of frequency and percentage

Table 2
Feedback responses from despondences in terms of frequency and percentage on how much each of the following impact employee performance

Table 3
Summary of the survey associated with the main question of the survey

Table 4
The summary of survey on the effect of removing financial demotivating factors on employees' motivation

Table 5
The summary of survey on the effect of removing non-financial demotivating factors on employees' motivation

Table 6
The influence of financial demotivating factors versus non-financial factors