The Effects Of Foreign Workers’ Performance On The Quality Of Service In Singapore
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Introduction
The study aims at exploring the quality of services produced by foreign workers in Singapore. Shortage of manpower inn many areas have led to employing foreign workers in Singapore.
Work Performance
Work performance is mainly how someone performs in their job. The word performance has more to do with outcome; it is the success in an organization. It should be the objective of everyone in a certain career to perform effectively in their job and this can be done by understanding one’s job description, your position and all the requirements of the job one is doing (Kuo, & Chen, 2007, 23). It is also important to understand one’s supervisor’s expectations’ and the performance review process that will be used to determine the quality of work done (Wee, 2001, 55). It is important to discuss with one’s supervisors issues that affect your work performance and things that can be done to help improve work performance.
Fong and Lim (2002, 572) describes performance as an individual level variable meaning that performance in work should be something that a single individual does. Fong and Lim (2002, 67) define performance as behaviour consisting of more than what is observable in an individual, it also includes the mental productions of an individual and this differentiates performance with success. Chowdhury (2003, 18) explains in a way that performance being behaviour leads to success but there is more than behaviour that leads to success, for success to be there influence of other individual must be involved.
Chowdhury (2003, 21) also stated that goal relevant is one of the key features of job performance. This is because performance should be related to goals of an organization. Campbell (2009) came up with certain factor models of performance. This is because performance is not single unified because the different kinds of jobs available have different performance standards.
These factors include task specified behaviours which is the behaviours that individuals adopts due to the job they are doing. There is also the non-task specific behaviours which are behaviours undertaken by individuals but not particularly related to their job (Huff, 1999, 238-9). The third factor is communication both written and oral which is involved on how the message is delivered. Performance of an individual assessment according to Campbell (2004) is effort which shows the commitment of people to their job. The fifth factor is personal discipline; people are expected to obey the law. The other model says that individuals are expected to help out their colleagues to help maintain group goals. Supervisory or leadership component is the other factor and the last factor according to Campbell (2004, 112) is managerial which involves the sectors of one’s job that does not require supervision.
Ayubi (2001, 66) also had his model on work performance. Performance according to Ayubi is broken into four dimensions and the first is the task oriented behaviours which just like in Campbell’s model involve the tasks that are relevant to one’s job. The other dimension is interpersonally oriented behaviours which is the interaction between an individual and the other employees. The third dimension is down- time behaviours which are an individual’s behaviours during their free time and the last dimension is destructive behaviours.
Measures of Work Performance
There are three major classes of workers’ productivity. The first one is production counts which aim at measuring what every individual in an organization produces. The individual with the highest is declared the most productive worker. There are however certain difficulties with the method and one are that this method can lead to changing behaviours of workers (ERC, 2003). The other difficulty is that the method is not very effective due to the fact that sometimes production is not due to workers effort but due to technology used.
Personnel data is another way to measure worker’s performance which includes using the personnel information from their files. The main personnel index that is used by many organizations is checking on the absenteeism of an individual and most organizations prefer employees working for eight hours in a day. Hui and Hashmi (2004, 76-8) defined absenteeism in many ways such as the average length of absence. However this measure is not that reliable as it gives little information. The third way of measuring work performance is supervising individuals when they are performing their duties and then judging their work performance by either comparing between workers or comparing with a set standard.
There are researches that have been done focusing on good job performance and there are two factors of job performance construct. One is the behaviours necessary in an organization so that it may function smoothly. These behaviours include cooperation and communication skills. The other factor is the performance on certain tasks undertaken by individuals and the tasks are related to the individuals work (Kuo, & Chen, 2007, 165).
Service Quality
The word servqual means measuring quality in services provided by workers. The model shows the requirements that are required so as to deliver high quality in services. The models works by identifying five gaps that lead to poor services been delivered. The assumption of servqual is that customers do evaluate the quality of services offered by a firm and this can be done by comparing what they are expecting and what they actually get (Fong, 2005, 71).
The first gap exists when the customer’s expectation is not met. This is due to the management perception of what the customer wants which occurs due to poor research by the management and interpreting information wrongly. The second gap is between what the management of the firm perceives and service quality (Huff, 1999, 231). This is when the management perceives exactly what the consumer wants but fails to set a certain performance standard. This may occur due to lack of commitment of the management or poor planning.
The third gap is between the specified service quality and the service delivery due to the service personnel. This occurs due to poor training or the failure to match demand and supply and also the ineffective internal marketing. The fourth gap is between the service delivery and external communication (Fong, 2005, 55-7). This is because organizations pass information about their services using advertisements or using sales persons, there are specifications of the services when advertising but this is not what is delivered to the customers. This occurs due to over-promising of organizations to their consumers and also failure to manage customer expectations’. The fifth gap is between the expected service and the experienced service this occurs when there is a misinterpretation by the consumers about the quality of the service (MTI, 2009).
There are certain determinants that actually influence appearance of a gap. One of the determinants is competence which is possessing skills and knowledge required to perform the service (Hui, & Hashmi, 2004, 99). The second is courtesy is a worker’s consideration of the property of the customer. There is also credibility which is having characteristics of honesty and trustworthiness and this is the workers having the customer’s best interest first. The fourth determinant is security which in an organization is when there is confidentiality, physical safety and also financial security to the customer (Tremewan, 1994, 23). Access is the other determinant which involves the ease with which a customer can get to the management in a firm.
The other determinant is communication which is ensuring that there is no language barrier between the management and the customers. Knowing the customer is the other determinant which is ensuring that the management makes an effort to know the customers’ needs (Kuo, & Chen, 2007, 155-7). The eighth determinant is tangibles, which as the name suggests is the appearance of services provided to the customers. Reliability is the other determinant which means the organization delivering what they promised to the customers (Sanderson, 2002, 56). The last determinant is responsiveness which is how the management helps the customers when they come to them for their assistance.Hypotheses Testing
The overreliance on foreign workforce in Singapore impacted on the performance and productivity of the labor industry. These effects were both negative and positive. The contribution of the foreign workforce in Singapore to the quality of services offered was tested and investigated by a number of researchers purposely to determine nature of the relationship. These researches statistically tested the relationship by formulating hypotheses to the study. Some of the hypotheses tested in these studies include:
There was a significant relationship between low productivity growth rate in Singapore and the overreliance on the cheap foreign labor.
The excessive reliance on foreign labor resulted into lack of creativity, innovation, and invention skills in Singapore, hence a decline in the quality of services.
The decline in the entrepreneurial skills was attributed to overreliance on foreign labor.
The Results of the Hypotheses
Studies by Huff (1999), Islam (1997) and Krugman (1994) established that the long-term consequence of Singapore relying on cheap foreign talent was the disincentive for the firms and employers to invest their resources in capital investment projects that had the potential of improving the productivity of the workers. In their view, without investing in short-term and long-term productivity boosting capital investments, Singapore’s economic growth potential will continue to depend on the influx of foreigners, which is unsustainable. The performance of the foreign workers is limited by their temporary permits that do not grant them permanent residence in Singapore. For this reason, foreign workers’ employment duration is uncertain because had they stay longer, their productive capacity would increase. Besides, the lower pay and remunerations that foreign workers are entitled to further limit their productivity as such compensations are not little to induce them to work harder. The decline in the country’s productivity is affected by the fact that foreign laborers and workers in Singapore lack the needed skills that the Singaporeans possess, hence the difference in the productive capacities. Such lower technical and professional skills possessed by the foreigners lower their level of competence and reliability.
A study by ERC (2003) tested the statistical significance of foreign labor and innovativeness capacity of Singapore. The study revealed that the Singapore’s post-independence financial and economic plan (shifting to high capital intensive economy from low-capital intensive economic system) heavy depended on the adaptation or copying of imported technology brought by the foreign investors with little domestic technological creativity. This therefore, was likely to have a long-term negative implication on the quality of services offered by the domestic firms.
With respect to entrepreneurial skills, Islam (1997) research found that Singapore was likely to suffer a major setback in its entrepreneurship capacity given that it heavy relies on foreign talents to raise capital and assume the risks associated with investments. This was because of the possibility of crowding out of local entrepreneurship by the dominant foreign talents by creating labor aristocracy in the economy. These thus limited the capacity of Singapore to develop its local entrepreneurship talents.
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