What do we know about Employee Productivity?: Insights from Bibliometric Analysis

Purpose: It is an established conception that increased employee productivity plays an instrumental role in the sustained success of a business. Resultantly, organisations have pursued it with utmost priority. The study intended to present the academic patterns as well as structures concerning research in the field of employee productivity from the year 2002 to 2021 using bibliometric tools and applications. Design/methodology/approach: The Scopus database was used to extract the data for this study. To determine the current state of research on employee productivity, the most widely acknowledged indicators used for performing bibliometric analysis have been employed. A software application named VOS viewer is used for mapping bibliographic data. Originality/value: The term ‘productivity’ has gained popularity in the corporate quarters in recent years which has generated the interest of authors in analysing their research patterns. Moreover, no such retrospective bibliometric study on employee productivity is conducted so far.


INTRODUCTION
Employee productivity has been a matter of substantial interest to management experts since the beginning of management research during the Industrial Revolution and continues to be so in the twenty-first century in a Covid-19 environment. The belief that productivity has the ability to influence both employee and organisational performance, as well as an organisation's ability to maintain a competitive advantage over other businesses, has sparked a surge of interest in the subject among academics throughout the world. [1] It is a critical aspect in enhancing, strengthening, and sustaining a business's overall success. [2] It was difficult to comprehend and assess the definition of employee productivity. For example, the traditional definition of productivity has mostly focused on the ratio of input costs to the output value. [3] In the field of management, productivity has been defined as a measure of efficiency and effectiveness. As a result, it's critical to recognise who the productive employees are. Employee Productivity can be defined as time spent actively by employees on tasks that require execution and production. Similarly, Coker (2011) [4] defined employee productivity "as the level of employees' performance in relation to attendance, work quality, the capacity of performance and personal factors".
In the words of Naeem and Ozuem (2021) employee productivity indicates the extent to which the adoption of technology minimises the time and effort required to complete a specific work. Further, they stated that when health professionals use social platforms, they can learn from their experiences, wisdom and knowledge with colleagues and subordinates. This helps them to be more productive because they can help each other. [5] One of the most important objectives for several firms has been to improve employee productivity. This is because greater productivity offers different advantages to a firm and its personnel. For example, increasing productivity leads to economic expansion, high profits and better social advancement. The productive employees can also get greater earnings, better working conditions and more favourable opportunities for employment. In addition, it tends to optimise the competitive advantage of organisations by reducing costs and improving high production quality. It is therefore vital to look at the background to ensure the long-term success of the company. Numerous studies have concentrated on one or two methods of measuring productivity and because there are so many different methodologies, it can be difficult to compare the results. In general, there is a dearth of effective and standardised methods for evaluating productivity. [6] Ramirez and Nembhard (2004) [7] discussed various measures of the productivity of knowledge workers and identified various dimensions for measuring productivity such as quality, control and cost. The study posited that industry is highly aim for better employee performance. The study analysed the relationship between organisational norms and employee productivity. The results depicted that employee productivity is supported by different factors i.e. customer-client relationship, profitability, leadership style and teamwork and these factors build up a support system for developing a positive relationship between organisational norms and employee productivity. High productivity was also reported with the increase in the age of the employees. On the contrary, a study by Van Dalen et al. (2010) [14] specified that younger employees less than age 50 were more likely to demonstrate high productive levels exhibiting hard skills such as flexibility, physical and mental wellbeing and adoption of new technology rather than older employees more than age 50 emphasised more on soft skills such as commitment and social skills. Cropanzano and Wright (2001) [15] defined happiness as the satisfaction derived from a job and concluded that if employees are happy at work, they are more productive. Consequently, happy employees are productive employees. Likewise, Mohammad (2019) [16] posited that job satisfaction has a favourable impact on the productivity of employees.
Another study highlighted the strong association between work-life balance and employee engagement corresponding to high levels of employee productivity. Work-life balance has a significant impact on organisational productivity as well as the economy as a whole. It results in lower absenteeism, boosted productivity, and a more responsive and effective workforce. [17] Organisations strive to increase the work engagement of their employee's, as engaged employees are more productive. It can be strengthened through family-friendly policies and work-life balance practices and thereby contributing to the area of employee behaviour and improving employee productivity. Ferreira et al. (2019) [18] highlighted that work engagement mediates the relationship between emotional exhaustion and negative affect and predicted the effect of presenteeism on the loss of productivity. The study asserted that health-related problems can be reduced by presenteeism affecting employee productivity. The results indicated that higher work engagement could result in low productivity loss corresponding to high levels of energy and mental resilience. Likewise, Wei et al. (2020) [19] suggested that perceived honesty in leadership is one of the most important things that can make employees more productive at their job. The study adopted dual strategy orientations i.e. market orientation and innovation orientation. The innovation orientation approach adopts new ways of performing work by exploring existing norms, resources and new products. The market innovation approach collects information about the market. The results demonstrated that managers might be able to integrate both market and innovation orientation when the integrity in leadership is high and yield a high level of firm performance. Leadership gives employees drive and creates a strong sense reliant on the productivity of knowledge employees, which was hitherto mainly relied on the productivity of manual labour. A study by Cho and Erdem (2006) [8] suggested that measuring the productivity of employees seeks to improve efficiency of organisations by increasing revenue for firms with a finite number of employees. Another study by Dorsett (2006) [9] developed four approaches for improving employee productivity such as experimenting, observing, inquiring and analysing. In the first approach, employees can learn by performing the task, hence, it is a "learning by doing" approach. In the second approach, the employee learns by observing others performing the task and then replicating it. In the third approach, they used to inquire about the things to see what others think, look for other options and provide feedback and in the fourth approach, employees perform better if things are practiced in a particular manner. Likewise, Ruch (1994) [10] identified five ways of measuring the productivity of employees such as defining productivity and guiding the behaviour, monitoring the performance and providing feedback, diagnosing issues, contributing to innovation and improving planning. They also argued that productivity is not the only criterion for assessing an individual's or an organisation's success. It is interdependent with other facets of organisational success such as personnel performance, financing decisions, innovation and competitive effectiveness any of which might result in organizational failure. On the contrary, Vallo and Mashau (2020) [11] pointed out that if the wrong measure was adopted, it might lead to misleading results thereby severely affecting employee productivity. Therefore, employee productivity is considered to be a key indicator of performance.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE
As the costs of employee selection and training continue to increase, there is a need to emphasise on making the workforce productive. Employee productivity is of utmost importance as the industry depends on them and it has a direct impact on the performance of organisations. Ahmad et al.(2020) [12] analysed the relationship between performance work practices and organisational performance. The study demonstrated that using high-performance work practices methods enhances organisational performance significantly and can result in improved employee outcomes, such as absenteeism and turnover, as well as increased labour productivity and financial performance, can be achieved. Moreover, recruitment, selection and training are positively associated with higher performance, productivity and lower turnover rates.
A Study by Singh (2019) [13] posited that employees are considered a valuable asset to the company and it becomes difficult to retain those employees who perform at their best. In order to attain employee productivity, most companies

METHODS
Bibliometric tools such as Citation, Keyword, Co-Citation, bibliographic coupling and Co-occurrences of keywords were used to investigate employee productivity literature across organisations. It is a form of network research that combines a systematic review of the literature with bibliometric analysis.
To perform a bibliometric study, the first step is to select the right database for document retrieval. For this purpose, the bibliometric data was collected from Scopus database. The data was administered to retrieve employee productivityrelated bibliometric data: "Employee productivity" OR "Productivity" OR "Employees Productivity". This search strategy included a database from 1 Jan.2002 to 28 July, 2021. The inclusion criteria for this bibliometric data were resulting: a) research articles published on Employee Productivity topic; b) language of the publication was English; c) research articles by subject area including Business, Management, and Accounting, Social Sciences, Psychology, Arts and Humanities d) studies published from 2002 to 2021, were included as shown in Figure 1.
Bibliometric analysis is a quantitative examination of bibliographical materials. We choose to use papers from journals since they are regarded as "certified knowledge" and because they are the outcome of an evaluation process, giving credibility to the results. As a result, we didn't include proceedings papers, news or other forms of documents discovered in databases.
The author employed bibliometrics to resolve the issues identified. Using the software, the descriptive analysis was conducted to evaluate the types and characteristics of documents.

RESULTS
The results showed a total of 210 documents that were authored by 507 authors with 0.414 documents per author ( Table 1). Most of the documents had multiple authors of loyalty. A dynamic leader promotes employee productivity and performance because of the favourable workplace culture. Yas et al.(2020) [20] in their study identified the problems associated with employee productivity and categorised them into different factors such as personal factors, miscellaneous factors (staff skills, customer services) organisational culture, personal problems, managers attitudes, job content and financial reward. The study presented the significant positive impact of the attitude of the manager, contents of the job and financial reward on employee productivity. Likewise, Naoum (2016) [21] in his study identified factors affecting the productivity of employees including management and organisational factors. The former includes managerial skills, leadership styles, job satisfaction and motivational factors whereas the latter includes technology and innovation. Buchel (2000) [22] suggested various aspects of employee productivity at organisational level. The study examined the various dimensions of productivity such as job satisfaction, health status, tenure, on-the-job training and the importance of stress on the wellbeing of employees. The results depicted employees living in rural areas with better health conditions are more satisfied than those in urban areas. The overeducated employees tend to be working for longer tenure and required on-the-job training. Hence, they are stress-free, satisfied and productive. Adejare et al. (2020) [23] have also identified the factors including employee productivity, satisfaction, attrition and retention, profitability and survival of an organization influencing the practices of employee training. Moreover, they suggested employee training has become increasingly important for increasing overall productivity resulting in the overall development of employees and organisations.
The following are the Specific Objectives of this paper: • To identify the field's most prolific and distinguished scholars.
• To rank universities' influence in research of employee productivity.
• To rank academic publications in the field of employee productivity research according to (a) the number of papers published and (b) the number of citations; • To assess international collaborations on the basis of (a) the number of publications published and (b) citation analysis; • To ascertain current trends in employee productivity.
The next sections comprise a literature review, a methodology section, results, discussion along with conclusion section, implications, limitations and finally, suggestions for future study.

Annual Publication
The research articles on Employee Productivity that were retrieved from 2002 to 2021 are shown in Figure 2. The publication per year has been categorised into four stages describing period-wise publication. In the first stage, from 2002 to 2003, the publication growth was very low indicating a low level of awareness of employee productivity. During this phase, the notion of employee productivity was associated with students' education measuring frustration, job satisfaction, job insecurity and layoff. The studies revealed that over-educated enjoyed various monetary and non-monetary benefits, despite this they were less productive but the threat of being laid off from the organisation made them productive. [24] In the second stage, from 2004 to 2012 the number of research articles starts rising gradually. During the second phase, the research has focused on productivity with respect to knowledge workers, performance of organisation and employees. [25][26] Then again, the third stage from 2013 to 2017 depicts a sluggish growth rate. The third phase measured the effect of compensation practices for enhancing the performance of employees and measured the effect of individual pay system practices on employee productivity. [27] Similarly, employee productivity was associated with organisational trust and this relationship was measured through organisational citizenship behaviour. [28] In the fourth stage, the number of publications witnessed an upward and downward trend from 2018 to 2020. In this phase, the effect of wellness programs was examined on employee productivity. The study implies that corporations can boost productivity by implementing socially acceptable health practices that benefit both employees and the bottom line. [29] The fifth phase witnessed a surge in the number of publications reported in 2019 and 2020. Under this phase, employee productivity was associated with stress management, [30] attitudes, organisational culture, norms and leadership styles, working hours and gender diversity. [31] This phase has discussed that various factors such as reduced stress, better employee attitudes, conducive culture, effective leadership and flexible working hours can improve the performance and productivity of employees. As COVID -19 pandemic affects the work of authors, reviewers, Editors and publishers till July 2021, only nine articles were published on employee productivity. These articles explored the aspects of working from home, work-life balance and employee engagement, the productivity of healthcare professionals and employees working hotel industry.

The most cited Employee Productivity articles (EP)
Identifying and analysing the most cited papers in a specific discipline gives more information about the scientific literature that the research in this field believes to be the most important. The number of citations a journal article receives indicates how influential it is. [32] Table 2 shows the results of the 15 most cited articles of EP with more than 100 citations. This analysis shows the most-cited research articles of EP by top-notch researchers, as well as the number of citations and the percentage of citations per year. Table 2 shows a group of four articles that each have more than 100 citations. Many of these articles also get more citations each year, which shows that they are important for the growth of EP research.
The article measuring "knowledge worker productivity: A taxonomy" by Ramrez YW has received the highest number of global citations with 155 citations. Similarly, the article "Productivity of Older Workers: Perceptions of Employers and Employees" by Van Dalen (2010) received 145 citations whereas the article "The Economic Benefits of Green Buildings: A Comprehensive Case Study" by Ries received    the third highest citations i.e., 123 respectively. Ries asserted that good physical work environment can lead to increased employee productivity, satisfaction, better health and safety and lower rates of absenteeism. [33] There are around 11 articles having more than 50 citations. Van Dalen revealed that younger employees were more productive as compared to older employees. They posses hard attributes which include adaptability, physical and mental capability, and an ability to embrace new technical abilities. [34] Additionally, it is fascinating to examine which journals published the 15 most cited publications. As indicated in  (47), and Information Technology and People (46). As a result, it is reasonable to believe that the number of citations generated by these articles is highly correlated with the journal rankings in which they were published.

Most Productive Countries and Institutions
The top 15 productive countries, their total publications and total citations are exported to reflect the country-wise publications.  (39), has an average citation rate of 20.88 and has been cited 355 times. Table 3 shows that the number of citations does not always correlate with the number of publications, as seen in the graph. High publication does not necessarily imply high citation; on the contrary, high citation might occur in the context of low publication.
It is also worth noting that the majority of the countries on the list are nearly economically developed. This could be attributed to busy company operations, a diverse cultural background, and a dense concentration of educational institutions. Further research found that out of 52 countries with 5 or more publications, 23 are developed. While other developing countries on the list, such as India, China, Malaysia,  respectively. And the two USA institutions i.e., New York University and Wake Forest University ranked fourth and fifth in the average citations.

Bibliographic Coupling among the countries publishing Employee Productivity
Initially, Small introduced the co-citation relationship in 1973 [35] in supplement to the Bibliographic coupling. It is utilised to study the structure of literature in view of the aforementioned publications. If the two documents have appeared jointly in the third publication, then they are termed as co-cited. Another relevant topic to be addressed is the bibliometric coupling of countries and institutes publishing in employee productivity. According to Kessler (1963) [36] when the two articles cite the same third article, it's called bibliometric coupling. All the 57 countries are grouped together into five clusters, each with a different colour.i.e. USA, UK, Australia, Canada and Malaysia. The presence of a link between two nodes indicates that they cooperate, and the width of the link indicates the strength of the relationship, i.e. the frequency of collaboration. The size of a node is determined by its TLS, which is the total of all the node's link strengths. Figure 3 depicts the results based on a publication threshold of 4 documents and the 57 countries that publish the same literature. The countries have been ranked according to the number of citations. In Figure 3, the United Kingdom,  Table 5 lists the top ten countries with the strongest cooperation linkages. Table 5 shows the top ten countries that use the same kind of literature for their publications.  Another critical part of the bibliometric analysis is determining how the universities and institutes that contribute are related to one another. In this part, we examined the bibliographic coupling (BC) of universities that contribute to the domain of employee productivity. Figure 4 depicts the results based on a threshold of 30 cited document of each university and the 53 institutes that publish the same literature. The picture depicts 7 clusters, each represented by a different colour. Each colour is determined by the bibliographic coupling of the respective universities. Universities in the green colour have strong bibliographic coupling with one another, and the same is true for the remaining clusters.
Link strength divided by TLS is how strong a group is together. The study found that 53 of 406 institutions had published at

Most Productive Authors
Under this section, the publication is analysed from the author's point of view. The number of publications an author has in a certain time period is said to signify his or her scholarly In Table 7, the top 10 most productive authors, their total publications and total citations, average citations with their h-index have been enumerated. TP signifies the total publications; TC signifies the total citations and the h-index signifies the number of publications of researchers and the number of citations of their work. It was found that just three authors had more than two publications in the area, whereas seven authors had two publications in the area.  to countries such as the UK, Netherlands, UAE, Pakistan, India, Spain and Malaysia respectively.
In Figure 5, the author's production over period of time is shown. With the support of Biblioshiny software, the impact of the author was examined.
The productivity of the author has increased here over the course of the year. The larger the circle in each year, the greater the productivity of the author in that year. As seen in Figure 5, Ahmad M, Raziq MM, Smith A and Wang L has the larger circle representing the greater productivity of the author in a particular year. Cooper CL has the highest author's production with 3 highest cited publications. Out of 3 articles, the article titled "Job and work attitudes, engagement and employee performance: where does psychological wellbeing fit in?" [37] published in Leadership and organization development journal has been cited 45 times with 4.5 total citations per year in the year 2012. Henkens K (2010) and Van Dalen (2010) has the second-highest production with an article titled "Productivity of older workers: perceptions of employers and employees" published in Population and Development Review has been cited 143 times with 11.91 total citations per year. Ahmad M (2019) has the third highest production with an article titled "Linking e-HRM practices and organizational outcomes: empirical analysis of line managers perception" [38] published in Revista Brasileira De Gestao De Negocios has been cited 5 times with 1.66 total citations per year. Rodrguez-Duarte A (2009) has the fourthhighest production with an article titled "The effects of training on performance in service companies: a data panel study" [39] published

Most Productive Journals
The importance of journals in the domain of employee productivity was determined by their productivity (the number of articles published) and the number of citations. The most productive journals have been identified on the basis of total citations. Table 8  The number of publications by each journal is another factor used to determine the influence of journals. According to the total number of publications, the most relevant journal  , and C (present the remaining recognised quality journals). [40] The American Journal of Business and Management (AJG) rates the quality of business and management journals. It categorises journals into 1, 2, 3, 4, and 4* categories in chronological order, with 4* being bestowed to the highestquality journal. Academic researchers frequently use both ABDC and AJG lists as a recruiting tool in business schools.
We discovered 13 papers in Grade A (ABDC) and 2 (AJG) journals, as well as 6 papers in Grade B (ABDC) and 1 (AJG) journal, among the 210 total publications. It's also fascinating to see which journals published the top 15 publications. As shown in Table 9, all of these journals are well-known and have a high research impact, indicating that they are of excellent quality. Management Science has published two of the 15 most frequently cited papers (4.219). As a result, it's reasonable to believe that the number of citations produced by these papers is linked to the journal rankings in which they appeared. 0.861 has lowest impact factor respectively. Of 15 journals, 3 journals have more than 3 impact factor and 2 journals have more than 2 and 1 impact factor.

Co-Citation of Journals in Employee Productivity
The most popular bibliometric analysis method is co-citation analysis. Two publications cited together in one article are co-cited. It's quite likely that these two references share something when the other two publications are co-cited by the other articles. Co-citation analysis is employed as an advanced bibliographical technique for the discovery of the co-citation pairs which enable scientists to gain insight into the cumulative tradition, knowledge and intellectual framework of scientific study. [41][42] The most relevant articles were analysed on the topic of employee productivity. Out of the total of 5019 journals, authors have selected those journals which are having 25 minimum number of citations in each paper meeting the threshold value of 36 journals. We assessed the overall number of citations per journal for the top contributing journals in this field. Table 10 endorses the results presented in Figure 6. The results predict that an article published in the top 10 journals would be cited within the articles published in the journals.  Group 2 includes 4 keywords such as productivity, efficiency, performance, social media, universities and higher education. Again, in this group, employee productivity is mainly associated with productivity and performance. This group indicated the fact, both performance and productivity are complementary to each other. The keywords in group 3 include workplace health, health, and productivity, health promotion, workplace, personal health, absenteeism and stress. This group indicated that the activities of health promotion through various programs such as absenteeism and stress i.e. eustress and distress at the workplace influence the productivity of employees. The keywords in group 4 include employee productivity, motivation, knowledge management, human capital, service quality, employees and skills. This group indicated that motivated, knowledge-oriented and skilled employees always tend to be productive. The keywords in group 5 include employee involvement, construction industry and competitive advantage. This indicates that when employees are totally involved in their work, it will yield a competitive advantage over other firms for improving their productivity. The keywords in group 6 include presenteeism, health and corporate social responsibility. In this group, health and presenteeism are positively and significantly associated with each other, the rate of presenteeism will increase if the employees are physically or mentally healthy. Likewise, the activities of corporate social responsibility have brought a significant change in the behaviour of employees resulting in improved productivity. The keywords in group 7 include leadership, gender diversity and innovation. Employees from different backgrounds, including those who are minorities, bring new ideas to the table and help drive innovation. The keywords in group 8 include employee motivation and organisational culture. When organisations establish a strong culture of appreciation and recognition, employees become more motivated and productive.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
The objectives of this study were to examine the research on employee productivity by bibliometric analysis of bibliographic coupling, citations, co-citations and co-occurrence of author keywords. It used a bibliometric approach to analyse 210 scholarly publications published between 2002 and 2021 in 147 journals. This article makes three significant contributions: it identifies the most notable researchers, universities, countries and journals on the topic of employee productivity. To get to these conclusions, we did a bibliometric analysis, evaluating the most influential research, prolific authors and relevant journals via document co-citation analysis. We also examined how productivity grew over time via an evaluation of author keyword usage. The study discovered a consistent increase in employee productivity research during the study period. The current study analysed contributions from institutions, journals feedback, motivation and attitude. In this case, it can be seen that two of the clusters (red and yellow) are closely linked, which shows that their subjects of research (human resource management, personality, psychology, human behaviour) are closer, whereas the red cluster is composed of journals whose principal subjects of research are connected with aspects of management and the green cluster is composed of occupational and environmental medicines.

Most Popular Keywords
The keywords of the authors provided insights into the main topics of study in employee productivity. The study on employee productivity through the author's keywords analysis will examine the relationships between research subjects and trace their conceptual structure. The author's keyword co-occurrence network illustrates which of the author's keywords frequently appear together. The cognitive structure of a field can be represented by co-word analyses.
The keywords of the author of the set of 210 articles were originally extracted. A threshold of 5 minimum cooccurrences of a keyword was selected to obtain analytical results. 44 keywords meet the threshold of 690 keywords. The more often used keywords are shown by larger circles and fonts, while the less frequently used keywords are denoted by smaller circles and fonts, and the distance between the two articles indicates the strength of the association.
As shown in Figure 7, Employee Productivity (104 occurrences) and productivity (56 occurrences) are the most used author's keywords, followed by job satisfaction (13 occurrences). The meaning of the term productivity of employees cannot be assured. This term often misleads health promotion, training, and corporate social responsibility; although, productivity equally often reflects the productivity of employees. According to this research, the author keywords network is divided into four separate groups: group1 (red colour), group 2 (green colour), group 3 (blue colour), group 4 (yellow colour), group 5 (purple colour), group 6 (light blue), group 7 (orange) and group 8 (brown).
Group 1 includes 5 keywords, such as employee's productivity, job satisfaction, employee behaviour, employee attitude, managers, productivity rate, human resource management and wellbeing. This analysis indicates that this group includes publications that focus on employee productivity related to job satisfaction and human resource management demonstrating the fact that on a whole the concept of employee productivity is applied to all the domains in human resource management at each and every level such as top, middle and lower level, demonstrating the significant contribution at both individual and organisational level.
topical coverage in areas focusing on employee productivity studies depicted a sluggish growth rate. The period from 2018 to 2020 witnessed upward and downward movement in the number of publications. During 2019 and 2020 witnessed a surge in the number of publications. Due to the increasing relevance of employee productivity, topics such as work satisfaction, performance, and training have emerged as key concerns for industry researchers and practitioners.

Limitations
This study is not free of constraints. There is a paucity of research on the concept of employee productivity. To begin, the current study eliminated papers presented at major conferences, books, book chapters, and dissertations. This should result in a better understanding of developing patterns in employee productivity. Second, certain restrictions are inherent in the nature of bibliographic databases and the bibliometric technique in general. The bibliometric study was limited to data acquired from the Scopus online database, as it contains the necessary information. Due to the limitations of the bibliometric co-citation methodology, evidence is drawn from widely cited papers, whereas less frequently cited documents may have a less significant impact on the research. Another weakness of this study is its reliance on the Scopus database, which may have resulted in the omission of a few papers indexed by WoS. For this study, it was not possible to merge both datasets since VOS viewer only supports the usage of bibliographic data from one database, not both. However, there is considerable overlap between the two datasets, and we encourage further work that includes bibliometric analysis of both databases.

Managerial Implications
The article provides insightful information to help academicians, managers and policymakers comprehend the concept of employee productivity and its application in the workplace. Our findings have significant implications for future studies. They illustrate the conceptual framework, and an individual or researcher new to this field of study can quickly gain an overview of the articles and the evolution of the research subjects to date. Managers must understand the importance of employee productivity in organisations. They should emphasis more on making an inclusive work environment. The relevance of employee productivity is felt during COVID-19 pandemic. Employees are considered a valuable asset to the company and it becomes difficult to retain those employees who perform at their best. In order to attain employee productivity, most companies aim for better employee performance. It is considered to be a key indicator of performance. Hence, there is a need to emphasise more on the notion of employee performance aiming the productivity. and scholars. One objective of this study was to determine the most prolific authors in the field of employee productivity studies between 2002 and 2021. Cooper CL was the most prolific author in terms of publication count and h-index. Assessing individual scholar's achievement enables educational institutions to compete in the worldwide university ranking system. Additionally, it assists academic administrators in establishing standards for annual faculty evaluations, salary, teaching loads, research funds and promotion. Additionally, the volume of published publications is a critical indicator of an academic institution's excellence. [43] The findings of the study indicated that Penn State University (USA), the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), Utrecht University (Netherlands), the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Institute (Netherlands), the University of Pittsburgh (USA), Kasetsart University (Thailand) and Marie Curie-Sklodowska University (Poland) were among the universities with the most prolific research on employee productivity. Acquiring a global leadership position in the evolving field of employee productivity can help a university improve its public image in the world's most popular ranking systems, such as the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) and the American Journal of Business and Management (AJG). As previously reported, our study discovered that top-tier journals obtained a greater share of citations than lower-tier publications. Journal of Intellectual Capital, Population and Development Review and Engineering Economist was the most influential journals in terms of average total citations.