Background Music, Mood, Personality, Work Behaviour and Performance of Garment Manufacturing Factories at Athi River Export Processing Zone in Kenya

Abstract

The general objective of this study was to determine the role of background music, mood, personality, work behaviour and performance of tailoring workers at the EPZ in Athi River, Kenya. The specific objectives were to establish the effect of background music on employee performance, determine whether employee’s mood mediates the relationship between background music and employee performance, establish the effect of personality on the relationship between background music and employee performance, establish the influence of work behaviour on the relationship between background music and employee performance and to establish whether the joint effect of background music, mood, work behaviour and personality on employee performance is greater than the effect of background music on employee performance. The study was based on the fact that there is little known knowledge about the effects of listening to background music in a factory set-up. It was anchored on structural evocation theory, Eysenck personality theory, theory of planned behaviour and James-Lange theory of emotions. It study adopted the positivist approach in conducting research since it operationalises concepts like background music, personality, work behaviour and employee performance to enable the use of quantitative data to test the research hypotheses drawn from the conceptual framework. The study was conducted in a natural work setup. The design was a field experiment. The study population was the 3 garment factories at the EPZ, Athi River. The study used systematic sampling design to come up with a representative sample. From a population of 4500, 357 estimated sample size was used for the study. 357 were divided by 3 to get a total of 119 tailors per factory. A systematic sampling procedure was used to obtain 119 tailors from each factory. This was done by listing all the 119 respondents for each factory and selecting every 12th. In the first factory, music was played throughout the day while in the second factory music was played on and off and in the third factory it was not played at all. The purpose of the variation was to assess the effect music has on performance at different times of the day. Diagnostic tests done included tests of validity, reliability, multicollinearity, heteroscedasticity, linearity and normality. The results were consistent with the assumptions of regression analysis. A descriptive analysis of the study shows that background music, mood, personality and work behaviour had an effect on performance of tailoring workers. T test done indicated that mean performance for factory 1 and 2 was significantly different from that of factory 3. Linear regression analysis done for hypothesis 1 indicated that the relationship between background music and employee performance was moderately strong for factory 1 (R=0.503) and weak for factory 2 (R = 0.146). Path Analysis proposed by Baron and Kenny was used for H2, results indicated that mood mediated the relationship between background music and employee performance (R2 = 0.562 for factory 1 and R2 =0.108 for factory 2). Three step regression analysis was used to analyse H3 and H4. Results indicated that personality moderated the relationship between background music and performance (R2 = 0.576 for factory 1 and R2=0.119 for factory 2) while work behavior did not moderate the relationship between background music and employee performance (R2 =0.314 for factory 1 and R2=0.0.1 for factory 2). The joint effect of all the predictor variables was greater than the individual effect of background music on employee performance. Multiple regression analysis for H5 indicate R =0.753 and R2 =0.567 for factory one and R =0.384 and R2=0.148 for factory two. The study therefore concludes that the effect of background music on employee performance is not direst but is through employee mood and that, that relationship is moderated by personality