Factors affecting construction labour productivity for Malaysian residential projects

Construction labour productivity is of great interest to practitioners and researchers because it affects project cost and time overrun. This paper evaluates and ranks the importance, frequency and severity of project delay factors that affect the construction labour productivity for Malaysian residential projects.

A total of 100 respondents consisting of 70 contractors, 11 developers and 19 consultants participated in this study. The respondents were asked to indicate how important each item of a list of 50 project related factors was to construction labour productivity. The data were then subjected to the calculation of importat indices which enabled the factors to be ranked.

The five most important factors identified by them were: material shortage at site; non‐payment to suppliers causing the stoppage of material delivery to site; change order by consultants; late issuance of construction drawing by consultants; and incapability of contractors' site management to organise site activities. On the other hand, the five most frequent factors were: material shortage at project site; non‐payment to suppliers causing the stoppage of material delivery to site; late issuance of progress payment by the client to main contractor; lack of foreign and local workers in the market; and coordination problem between the main contractor and subcontractor.

The inferences drawn from this study could be used by the project managers to take account of these factors at an early stage, hence minimising the time and cost overrun.