ABSTRACT

It would be plain logic to state that the tendencies of employees quitting their job is highly dependent on the nature of their workplace, although certain other factors outside the work environment like family related factors (e.g. marital status, offspring,) government policy, location etc. can influence turnover intentions among employees. The work environment is made up of an array of factors like organizational culture, style and quality of leadership, workplace demands, social support, sense of community, sense of coherence, job satisfaction etc. This study aims at investigating the influence of work environment on turnover intentions of construction workers in Edo state. The first research objectives sought to identify the work environment factors prevalent in the Edo state construction industry. In fulfilling this objective, the researcher derived the relative importance index for all the work environment factors listed in the questionnaires distributed to construction workers and ranked them. The result showed that “Income”, “Style and quality of leadership” and “Social support” with RII of 0.908, 0.884 and 0.876 respectively were the three highest ranked factors. The second objective sought to compare the work environment perception between blue-collar (construction labourers) and white-collar construction workers (construction professionals). This objective is quite important as it highlights the notion that the perception of the work environment by different types of construction workers might differ. This objective was achieved by using a Mann Whitney (U) test to compare their perception on the listed work environment factors. The result showed that there is a significant difference at α-level of 5% (0.05) in ten of the identified factors. The final objective was to determine the relationship between work environment and turnover intention. The result obtained from a bi-variate correlation of the level of importance and turnover intention using Spearman’s correlation coefficient showed that there is a statistically significant relationship between seven of the identified work environment factors and turnover intention.