Impact of Workforce Diversity on Employee Performance in Sri Lankan Construction Industry

Abstract

Workforce diversity provides heterogeneity to a workforce thereby making it a strategic capability to provide competitive advantage to organizations. Effective management of diverse human resource in the right manner can attract profitability to organizations as human diversity enhances the flow of novelty, creativity and innovation. This research study aims to investigate employee performance in construction industry in Southern and Western provinces of Sri Lanka. Out of numerous workforce diversity factors, age, educational background, work experience and attitudes were selected as the independent variables for the study. When conducting the research,120 questionnaires were distributed among employees engaged in the construction industry to collect data through simple random sampling technique. The results indicated that there’s a positive impact of diversity in terms of age, educational background, attitudes and work experiences on employee performance. The outcome of this study would benefit organizations in providing potential considerations to the management and workforce from different perspectives which would enable the distinguishing of dimensions of workforce diversity variables to further improve employee work performance.