Motivation, time management and work performance among female workers in Malaysia

Article history: Received 23 December 2016 Received in revised form 1 September 2017 Accepted 3 October 2017 In Malaysia, it is a fact that cannot be denied that female workers have subsidized to the development of the national economy. Realizing that fact, the government keeps on putting efforts to increase the women participation in the labor workforce with the hope to boost the economic growth of the nation. Many factors were found to have influenced female employees’ work performance. However, this paper aims to investigate the relationship between motivation, time management and job performance among the female workforce in Malaysia. The sample comprised a total of 218 female workers from the manufacturing, education, hospitality and health sectors in Malaysia. The sampling technique used was simple random sampling. A survey questionnaire was utilized to collect the data. Analysis of the data was performed by using the Statistical Analysis System (SAS-Studio) and the techniques employed to analyses the data were descriptive statistics, factor analysis (specifically principal component analysis) and multiple-linear regression (ordinary least squares) analysis. The results of the analyses show that time management and motivation have a significant, positive relationship with job performance among female workers in Malaysia.


Introduction
*The challenges of work performance are a matter of concern for many organizations and in many fields like management, occupational health, organizational behavior and organizational psychology as well (Koopmans et al., 2011).
Organizations are very concern about continuous performance because through performance, organizations are able to grow and expand which later reflects the economic growth of a nation. Until today, employees' work performance remains to be a topic of choice among researchers. In fact, past research revealed that there are many factors that can influence employees' job performance; personal factors, organizational factors and environmental factors. However, this study focuses on two variables that can influence employees' job performance which are motivation and time management. A number of studies have found that an employee's job performance is high when he or she is well motivated and manages time effectively (Selamat et al., 2013).

Background of the study
It is undeniable that female employees have contributed a lot to national economic development in recent years. In fact, it is believed that Malaysia can be transformed into a high income nation more quickly if more women join the labor force (Mohd and Rameli, 2014). Achieving an increase in number of the female workforce is important for the growth of the manufacturing and service sectors, as well as the health, education and hospitality sectors.

Problem statement
Female workers are contributors of economic development globally in the future and for this reason, they are important especially in the manufacturing and service sectors (Bakar and Abdullah, 2007). In Malaysia, women are important contributors to the nation's economic growth through their participation in the labour force. However, their participation especially in management positions is still low. Mohd and Rameli (2014) stated that the participation of women in the labour force in Malaysia still has not exceeded 50% in the last 30 years. As reported in Pengarang (2015), the latest figures show that female participation stands at 46%. This issue has become crucial as female participation is not rising that much even though the number of women enrolling in education is increasing. An important reason given for women's low participation in the workforce is that they cannot perform well in a job due to their shouldering of multiple-responsibilities. These issues have motivated the researcher to undertake a study to identify the determinants that could be influencing job performance among women workers in Malaysia (Uddin, 2010).

Research question
This research attempts to answer two main questions: 1) Is there a significant relationship between motivation and job performance among female workforce in Malaysia? 2) Is there a significant relationship between time management and job performance among female workforce in Malaysia?

Research objective
The purpose of this research is to determine the relationship between motivation, time management and job performance among female workforce in Malaysia.

Job performance
Work performance is identified as essential to gain competitive advantage and achieve greater productivity in an organization (Shaffril and Uli, 2010). Specifically, job performance refers to people's actions towards their job that can contribute to organizational goals and it is under the power of the individual (Rotundo and Rotman, 2002). Berghe (2011) defined job performance as the effort that a person put into performing his or her tasks or job. Research has found that there are various factors that can contribute to job performance. Bashir and Ramay (2010) reveal that there is a negative, significant relationship between job stress and job performance. Boon et al. (2012) also found that the significant factors that influence employees' job performance are work-family factor and personality. Organizational culture also directly influences employee performance (Resubun et al., 2013). Other researchers also reveal that there is a positive relationship between job involvement and job performance (Hussain et al., 2012). Even though the literatures suggest that various factors influence job performance, this study only focuses on two variables namely motivation and time management.

Motivation
The word motivation is not easy to understand and different people have different definition about motivation (Javed and Javed, 2013). Several studies have been undertaken to investigate the relationship between motivation and employees' job performance. Some of them produce mixed results. Results of a study by Awosusi and Jegede (2011) suggest that the level of job performance and job satisfaction among nurses under study was low. They also found that the level of motivation among those nurses was low and there was a negative relationship between motivation and job performance. The results of a study by Salleh et al. (2011) show that there is no significant difference between job motivation and job performance, which implies that employees who have low or high motivation show the same level of performance. A study by Aacha (2010) also concludes that motivation still contributes to the level of performance of a primary school teacher. It also found that there is a positive significant relationship between both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and job performance among teachers in the Kimaanya-Kyabakuza division in Uganda.

Time management
According to Pehlivan (2013), time management is about a person's capabilities, actions and other activities that enable him or her to use his or her time effectively. Past studies that use time management to predict job performance show that there is a positive influence between time management and job satisfaction. However, many people do not realize about the importance of time management. Njagi and Malel (2012) explain that if people refer to the theories about time management postulated in the literature they will be able to understand the importance of time management. It also claim that in order for time management to have a favorable impact on job performance the amount of control time that is desirable and needed is important to consider. Previous studies have found that a positive relationship exists between time management and job performance. For example, Abduljabbr et al. (2012) show that there is a positive relationship between time planning and time attitude with job performance. However, Tehrani et al. (2013) revealed that there are negative links between time management and job stress among employees in a sports organization.

Research framework
Based on the literature review of prior studies, a research framework was developed for this study which is illustrated in Fig. 1.  Fig. 1 shows that two independent variables are proposed in this study, namely motivation and time management. It is expected that these independent variables will have a significant relationship with job performance among female workforce.

Research hypothesis
Two hypotheses are tested in this study: H1: There is a significant relationship between motivation and job performance among female workforce in Malaysia. H2: There is a significant relationship between time management and job performance among female workforce in Malaysia.

Methodology
The data for this study was collected randomly from companies operating in four sectors namely education, manufacturing, hospitality and health. The companies are located in Peninsular Malaysia. These four sectors were chosen because they are female workforce dominant. This study uses a quantitative method, specifically a survey questionnaire to collect the required information. In this study, items used have been adapted and developed from prior studies. The items are tested by using factor analysis specifically the principal component analysis (PCA) and the rotation criterion adopted is varimax. In addition, descriptive statistics and multiple regression analysis are conducted to accomplish the objectives of this study.

Research instrument
The questionnaire used as the instrument in this study was designed to gain information on employee perceptions. The questionnaire consists of two sections. Part A contains questions that concern three variables; motivation, time management and job performance. Part B consists of questions to determine the respondents' demographic profile in terms of age, religion, marital status, educational level, income level, employment sector and location of company. The survey employs a five-point Likert scale so that the respondents can rate their level of motivation, time management and job performance by way of self-reporting. The scale range from 1 (strongly disagree), 2 (disagree), 3 (neither disagree nor agree), 4 (agree) to 5 (strongly agree). The measurement items that are used in this study have been adapted from the previous studies. Job performance has been measured by using employee survey adapted from Shaffril and Uli (2010). The item measuring job performance is divided into four dimensions which are work quantity, work quality, punctuality and work system. Next, motivation is measured by using items adapted from Javed and Javed (2013). The examples of items are "Job security motivates me to perform better', 'A positive working environment is important for me to perform well on my job', and 'I believe motivation and performance are strongly interrelated'. Meanwhile, time management is measured by using five items adapted from Njagi and Malel (2012). An example of an item used is "I think the performance contacts have a clear time frame'.

Sample description
The sample of this study comprises 218 members of the female workforce in Peninsular Malaysia who are employed in the education, manufacturing, hospitality and health sectors. As mentioned above, these sectors have more female than male workforce.

Findings
A screening process was conducted prior to embarking on the data analysis. Doing this ensures that the data is clean, complete and ready to undergo further statistical analyses. First, the demographic profile of the respondents was determined by using descriptive statistics. The outcome is shown in Table  1 that shows that the respondents are aged from 26-30 years (32.1%), followed by those aged 21-25years and 31-35 years (both at 20.6%), then those above 41 years (13.8%), 36-40 years (10.1%) and below 21 years (2.8%). The vast majority of the respondents are Muslim (93.1%). Most of the women are married (64.2%). As for educational level, the largest percentage of workers hold a high school qualification (37.65), while in descending order, others hold a diploma (34.9), first degree (19.7%), Ph. D (1.8%) or a primary school qualification (1.4%). The majority of them have an income level that is less than RM2000 per month (55.5%), and only 0.5% has an income that is more than RM10, 000 per month. The respondents are from the manufacturing (34.9%), health (24.3%), hospitality (21.6%) and education (19.3%) sectors and the highest proportion of respondents come from the state of Terengganu (27.1%). As mentioned earlier, this study used the survey design in the form of a questionnaire. Before the questionnaire was distributed to the respondents, it was tested for face validity and reliability.
Face validity was tested by distributing it to ten female workers in the education and manufacturing sectors to ascertain whether they could easily understand the questions. The questionnaire was also reviewed and validated by experts who are lecturers in the field of management studies. As for the reliability of the questionnaire, this was tested by using Cronbach's alpha, which is a traditional method to ensure that the scales of items (measurement) are absolutely reliable. According to   Table 2 shows the result of the reliability test. From the table, it can be seen that the value of Cronbach's alpha for motivation is 0.862, for time management 0.759 and for job performance 0.746. Thus it can be concluded that the reliability of the scale in this study is in the range from respectable to good.

Normality
The distribution of data was also assessed to determine whether the data used is normally distributed. For this purpose, skewness and kurtosis were calculated. According to Chua (2006), the distribution of data is considered normal when the value of skewness and kurtosis is in the range of -1 to +1.
From Table 3, it can be seen that the variables job performance, motivation and time management all have skewness and kurtosis values of less than 1. Hence, it can be concluded that the data is normally distributed.

Factor analysis
Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is a statistical approach that is used to determine the correlation among the variables in a data set (Hair et al., 2013). This type of analysis provides a factor structure, that is, a grouping of variables based on strong correlations. In general, an EFA should always be conducted for new data sets. The uniqueness of an EFA over a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is that no precedent theory will be applied as to identify which items belong to which constructs. This means that EFA can spot problematic variables much more easily than CFA. In this way, rotation causes factor loadings to be more clearly differentiated as this is often necessary to facilitate interpretation. In this study, the orthogonal rotation solution is used to determine the number of factors from the items through the use of varimax (most common). This method is used because it can minimize the number of variables with extreme loading (high or low) on a factor, which makes it possible to identify a variable as a factor. According to Hair et al. (1998), a significant factor loading for 200 samples is 0.40. Therefore, the significant factor loading applied in this study is 0.40 because the number of sample is close to 200 at 218, so this loading is judged to be sufficient. The results are displayed in the Table 4.  Table 4 shows that motivation has 10 items (coded as M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, M6, M7, M8, M9 and M10), job performance has six items (JP1, JP2, JP3, JP5, JP6 and JP7), and time management has four items (TM2, TM3, TM4 and TM5). From the factor analyses, it was found that the motivation variable is extracted into two factors which are factor 1 and factor 4 which are termed as financial and nonfinancial dimensions respectively. In addition, job performance and time management were extracted into factor 2 and factor 3. The determination of the factors using the eigenvalue is greater and equal to 1. Table 5 shows the total variance explained by each factors is more than 1.0.
The results in Table 5 indicate that the factors exceed the suggested value of eigenvalue greater than 1. Thus, from the above table, this study found that there are four factors produced trough analysis of exploratory factor analysis (EFA).

Regression analysis
Regression analysis was conducted in order to determine, whether motivation and time management have a significant relationship with job performance among female workers in Malaysia. A hierarchical regression analysis was used because after conducting factor analysis, there were two dimensions for the motivation variable, namely financial and non-financial motivation. Table 6 shows that the value of R-square is 0.1342 which means financial motivation, nonfinancial motivation and time management explain about 13.42% of the variance in job performance among female workers in Malaysia. As shown in Table 7, the value of probability F (11.05) is significant (P < 0.0001), which indicates that model 1 is statistically significant in explaining job performance. According to Pallant (2013), when the p-value is significant, this indicates that Model 1 is fit. Table 8 shows that in Model 1 two factors (time management and financial motivation) have a significant relationship with job performance, whereas one factor (non-financial motivation) does not have a significant relationship with job performance for model 1.  Table 8 also reveals that if time management increases by 1%, it influences job performance by about 20.59%, and if financial motivation increases by 1%, it influences job performance by as much as 20.4%. In contrast, when non-financial motivation increases by 1%, it influences on job performance is reduced by about 1.1%. Fig. 2 shows the model fitness for motivation and Job Performance at the first level.

Second level
A second stage test was applied in this research because after conducting EFA, motivation factor was extracted into two components namely financial and non-financial motivation. The second level showed the association from higher order to lower order components. The result of the second level test is presented In Table 9.   Table 9 shows that the value of R-square is 12.59%, which means that the two independent variables time management and motivation have a relatively small influence job performance. The remaining 87.1% is explained by other factors, which are not considered by this study. As revealed by Table 10 and Fig. 3, the value of probability F (15.48) is significant (P < 0.0001). This indicates that the model is statistically significant in predicting job performance, so model 2 is fit. Meanwhile, Table 11 shows that two factors have a significant relationship with job performance and this is verified by the p-value, which is less than 0.01. Table  11 also reveals that if time management increases by 1%, this variable influences job performance by as much as 20.59%. When overall motivation increases by 1%, this variable influences job performance by as much as19%.

Results and discussion
Based on the results demonstrated by both models, motivation has a significant positive relationship with job performance among female workers in Malaysia. Thus, Hypothesis 1 is Residual confirmed. This finding is similar to past research by Aacha (2010) who found that motivation contributes to the performance of a good teacher. It also found that there is a positive, significant relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and job performance among teachers in the Kimaanya-Kyabakuza division in Uganda.   From the results presented herein, it can be concluded that motivation is also a significant factor that influences female employees' performance in Malaysia. Thus, it is believed that if a good package of benefits was given to these female employees, this would boost their motivation to work harder. A financial appraisal is also an important way to help them to continuously improve their work performance. The results really support that motivation directly affects female employees' work performance in Malaysia. Besides, the results also indicate that time management is significant in explaining job performance among female workers in Malaysia. Thus, Hypothesis 2 which states that there is a significant relationship between time management and job performance among female workers is also supported. The findings of this study support those of Abduljabbr et al. (2012) who found that there is a positive relationship between time arrangement and job performance. Therefore, it can be concluded that female employees in Malaysia will perform better if the arrangement of time matched with their tasks. Therefore, it is important for employers to provide proper schedule for their employees and in fact it is a good practice if Residual employers can provide their new employees with training on effective time management.

Conclusion
From the analyses conducted in this study, it was found that time management and motivation have a significant, positive relationship with job performance among female workers in Malaysia. These results seem to provide a signal to employers the importance of providing benefits and pay packets that are most desirable in the eyes of their employees. Creative employers understand that they can attract and retain employees with innovative benefits, which later will bring the best returns to their companies. As for the time management, frequent trainings on effective time management can make employees appreciate their working time and make them more productive especially for women who carry multi responsibilities as mothers, wives and employees.