The Relationship Between Role Ambiguity, Competency and Person-Job Fit With The Job Performance of Employees in the Service Sector SMEs in Malaysia

Job performance of employees plays a crucial factor in determining a firm performance since highly performing individuals will be able to assist the firm to achieve its strategic aims, thus sustaining the firm’s competitive advantage. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are critical especially these firms have been contributing to the growth and promoting competitiveness among many nations. However, the problems of low productivity among the employees of the SMEs triggered the need to investigate the factor that may contribute to the reasons behind the productivity problems specifically among the employees from the service sector SMEs. Thus, this study was conducted to examine the relationship between role ambiguity, competency, person-job fit and job performance of employees in the service sector SMEs. It was previously reported that role ambiguity, competency and person-job fit have significant relationships with the job performance of employees. The respondents of this study consisted of employees who were working in the various sub-sectors of service SMEs throughout Malaysia. A quantitative method was employed and data were collected using mail survey. In total, 1500 questionnaires were distributed and 300 returned surveys were deemed usable for further analysis resulted in 20 percent response rate. Principal component analysis was employed to extract and rotate the factors understudied. Descriptive statistics were use to analyse the characteristics of the respondents, while multivariate techniques employed were correlation and multiple regressions.The results revealed that there were significant relationships between role ambiguity, competency and person-job fit with the job performance of employees. At the same time, among the three independent variables, role ambiguity was found to be the most important predictor to job performance as compared to competency and person-job fit. This study helps to highlight the importance of factors relating to job performance, which may be used to understand better the problem of low labour productivity among the employees of the service sector SMEs in Malaysia.