Feeling Positive and Productive: Role of Supervisor-Worker Relationship in Predicting Construction Workers' Performance in the Philippines

Abstract

Given the complex and dynamic nature of construction work, workers rely heavily on their supervisors for task allocation and ongoing guidance and support. Their relationships with supervisors can directly affect their performance, and by extension, project performance and organizational effectiveness. It is thus of utmost importance to investigate the impact of this working relationship on workers’ psychological, behavioral, and performance outcomes. Based on data collected from the construction industry in Philippines using a time-lagged research design, this paper investigates the role of supervisor-worker relationships in predicting workers’ emotions, job embeddedness, and in-role and extra-role performance. The results reveal that a high-quality working relationship between workers and their supervisors can facilitate workers’ positive emotions, leading to enhanced job embeddedness and superior performance. As such, organizations are recommended to equip supervisors with the awareness, knowledge, and skills to facilitate high-quality relationships with their workers. This research contributes to the construction literature by adding empirical evidence to explain whether and why high-quality worker–supervisor relationships actually influence construction workers’ performance. It also increases understanding of individual construction employees’ performance and well-being from a social-psychological theoretical perspective.