AN ASSESSMENT OF THE IMPACT OF WORK ENVIRONMENT ON THE PRODUCTIVITY OF CONSTRUCTION SKILLED WORKERS IN IMO STATE, NIGERIA

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1   BACKGROUND OF STUDY
Productivity has become the buzzword of the time as it is generally agreed that the more productivity the better.  However, productivity in construction industry is discouragingly low. The effect of this cannot be overemphasized. Aboyade (1966) believed a country’s development process depends on the capacity of the country’s construction industry, which accounts for half of the country’s fixed capital accumulation. Horneir (1987) confirmed the importance of construction industry by asserting that 10% increase in construction labour productivity will represent an enormous annual saving. Productivity reflects a variety of factors acting together to increase the value of output faster than the cost of input. Mc Beath (1974), Nwaroh (1987) and Kendrick (1977) found Mali’s (1978) definition of productivity acceptable. Mali (1978) defines productivity as “the measure of how well resources are brought together in organization and utilized for accomplishing a set of results” that is productivity is reaching the highest level of performance with least expenditure of resources. Riggs and Felix (1983) and Bain (1982) said as much when they stated that productivity Is not a measure of output produced; rather it is a measure of how well resources are combined and utilized to accomplish desirable results. It is, therefore, apparent that construction industry in Nigeria is a major contributor to the gross national product (GNP) Nwachukwu (2002) classified this industry under four main segments
(i)   The building segment
(ii)   The civil segment
(iii)   The mechanical/electrical segment
(iv)   Industrial/heavy
Engineering segment According to him, Nwachukwu (2002), the building industry segment in Nigeria constitute about 67% of the total construction activities in the country. Unfortunately, building construction site in Nigeria are currently passing through gloomy and difficult time as oppose to what used to be the boom situation in the early seventies, many factors such as high dependant of foreign building material and technology, lack of adequate finance, unfavorable government policies etc, have been identify as some of the problem of lack of productivity in construction work environment which has resulted to project abandonment, project failure, project delay. Another major problem that has recently attracted the attention of building stakeholders in the industry is the issue of “UNSKILLED” in the construction environment which has resulted to low productivity on building environment. This state of affairs does not represent a good image for the industry, hence the need to ask question “What can be done” it is against this background that this research an assessment of the impact of work environment on the productivity of construction skilled worker. A case study of IMO state Nigeria was conserved.