Determinant of Job Performance among Lower-Level Employees: A Case in the Central Region of Malaysia

According to earlier research, organizational culture is one of the determining variables that inspire individuals to accomplish their duties more effectively. However, on the relationship between the organizational culture and job performance, there were mixed results, and research on Malaysia's manufacturing industry is still lacking.. Hence, this paper aims to investigate the relationship between organizational culture and job performance among lower-level employees to be exact production workers in one multinational company located in the central region of Malaysia. A total of 103 production workers have been selected randomly as the respondent of the study. The Japanese Organizational Culture Scale (JCOS) was adopted to measure the organizational culture whereas the Individual Work Performance Questionnaire (IWPQ) was utilized to assess job performance. This study was cross sectional in nature and only collected participants data once.. Throughout the data analysis, SmartPLS version 4.0.9.5 was used for structural equation modelling and the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 27 was used for descriptive statistics. The results revealed that the level of organizational culture and job performance in the studied company is at a high level. The findings also prove that there is a significant relationship between organizational culture and the job performance of the studied respondents. Lastly, recommendations were also given to the studied company and future research.


Introduction
Employees are the key factor to an organization's sustainability as they are the ones involved in the day-to-day actions of the organization (Abdullahi et al., 2022).Without them, the operational process will be difficult, and neither for the organization to achieve success.On top of that, the intense competition in the industry has pushed organizations to improve the quality of its human resources (Fithriyana et al., 2022).Therefore, organizations must be responsible and provide optimum surroundings for the employees to best perform their jobs.In the circumstance of an organization losing a high-performing employee, they are said to be experiencing dysfunctional turnover that costs the organization (Kamalaveni et al., 2019).On that account, it is crystal clear that having employees with high job performance will benefit the organization.Job performance can be defined as the level of success that employees perform in accordance with their efforts to perform the assigned task (Ertekin & Avunduk, 2021).Ángeles et al. (2022) proposed that to achieve job performance goals, it is vital to determine different factors that could positively affect job performance.Based on Ferine et al. (2021), organizational culture, along with conflict, leadership, and work ethic have significant effects on employees' job performance.Another research conducted by Tuffaha (2020) provides findings that organizational culture, knowledge management, information and communication technology, innovation and creativity and employee's empowerment have a positive effect on employee performance.Interestingly, both pieces of research have one similarity, which they both agreed that organizational culture is interrelated with job performance although each finding showed different significant values.Additionally, Priyadharsan and Nithiya (2020) also found a significant contribution of organizational culture towards job performance.For Bamidele (2022), organizational culture is developed by the way an organization faces external and internal challenges and how it copes with it.Meanwhile, Lochner (2020) shared a method to analyze organizational culture bt observing what can be seen, said and believed by employees within an organization.A great organizational culture is easy to recognize and when employees realized it, they never want to exit (Galli, 2022).Just like any country's culture, organizational culture also contributes to creating a unique identity for its employees.As a matter of fact, there were several past studies that attempted to prove how organizational culture could influence the level of employees' job performance.Malaysia is home to thousands of companies in different industries.According to the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM), the nation's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increased to 3.1% in 2021 from -5.5% in 2020.Among the industries that have contributed to the increase, manufacturing was the highest with 9.5%.In December 2021, the manufacturing sector recorded an increase of 15.5% from the previous year for the sales value which is equivalent to RM143.9 billion.The number of employees in the sector also increased to 2,259,619 persons (DOSM, 2021).Thus, the researcher finds interest in conducting a study to investigate two variables that have been stated above which are organizational culture and job performance of a multinational company's lower-level employees located in the central region of Malaysia.

Literature Review Brief Overview of Organizational Culture
According to Upadhyay and Kumar (2020), organizational culture can be defined as the norms and expectations on how individuals behave and the way things are done in an organization including implicit norms, values, and assumptions.Likewise, Priyadharsan and Nithiya (2020) defined organizational culture as a balanced system of shared values, beliefs, philosophies, ecperiences, habits, expectation, norms and behaviors that differs an organization from others.In addition, the authors stated that organizational culture portrays the extent the organizational members are willing to support each other and the goals as well as the whole organizational development.Today, there are countless other definitions of organizational culture have been put forward that resembles one another vaguely.Simply speaking, organizational culture is the way employees do things around in the organization (Priyadharsan & Nithiya, 2020).One of the important task for employees is to interpret and understand organizational culture as it affects strategic development, productivity and learning at all levels (Priyadharsan & Nithiya, 2020).

Figure 1
Schein's multi-layered organizational culture model (Source: Morente et al., 2017) Figure 1 illustrates the Multi-layered Organizational Culture Model introduced by Schein (2010).Schein (2010) defined organizational culture as a pattern of shared basic assumptions by a group in an organization.Schein (2010) listed three levels of organizational culture which are artefacts, espoused beliefs and values, and basic underlying assumptions.The first level is artefacts.It is the surface of an organization and is visible for all to observe.Individuals who are unfamiliar with the culture still can see, hear, and feel since the culture is at the surface level.For example, the physical environment, the behaviours presented by employees, the way work is organized and processed, the technology, and the languages.However, this level only provides a limited understanding of the culture because they are just symbols that can differ based on the observer's interpretation, bias, and projections (Schein, 2010).Moving on to the next level of organizational culture is the espoused beliefs and values.Schein (2010) mentioned that all group learning reflects someone's original beliefs and values.When a group, or in this context the employees of manufacturing employees, first works as a team and faces a new challenge together, the first proposed solution to solve the problem will be from someone's assumptions on what will work or not work.If the proposed solution turns out to help eliminate the conflict, then it will be developed as the espoused beliefs and values among employees.Whenever they encounter similar problems in the future, they will use the same solution as they believe it will be effective once again.This culture level can be seen through an organization's stated vision, mission, goals, ideals, and principles (Schein, 2010).
Lastly, Schein (2010) stated that the cultural level of basic underlying assumption is the unstated thoughts and feelings that have an impact on the decision-making process and employee behaviour.According to Schein (2010), there are six types of assumptions.The first one is assumptions about the truth in the aspect of physical and social matters.The second type of assumption is in terms of time importance in a group.The next one is an assumption about the space to be owned and allocated.Following up is the assumption about the intricacies of human nature.The fifth one is the assumption about the relationship between the organization and the environment.The last assumption is in terms of the ways individuals relate to one another.Schein's model highlights the culture that is practised in an organization and shared by its organizational members.It provides three different levels of organizational culture from the most visible (artefacts) to the invisible (assumptions).Every level has clear differences from one another, and it suits the way an organization works as an entity that consists of many people from different backgrounds, beliefs, values, and assumptions.Thus, this model may provide an adequate reference in developing the instruments to evaluate the level of organizational culture in the studied company and fulfil the study's objectives.

Brief Overview of Job Performance
As mentioned by Priyadharsan and Nithiya (2020), job performance demonstrate how well employees perform their tasks, duties and responsibilities of the assigned job.The authors added, it is the way employees delivering their tasks with a proper manner which then lead the organization to achieve positive results.Darvishmotevali and Ali (2020) describe job performance as a list of individual behaviours related to the assigned job.The purpose of performance is to set a useful goal, not only to evaluate if it is helpful to the organization's goals, but the result of the work process itself (Nasrul & Alfalah, 2020).Employees in an organization can be high performers or poor performers.Mahadi et al. (2019) defined high performers as standouts and having enormous differences from others.They outperform expectations and often be given challenging projects to handle by top management.Optimal performance can lead towards the favorable quality and quantity of work which then resulted in fulfilling organizational and leadership expectations (Sharma et al., 2021).Figure 2 illustrates the three parts of job performance in this model.Task performance is about the effectiveness and efficiency an employee has to complete his tasks and responsibilities (Aslan , 2022).The authors added that employees may have a perceived specific task performance which means they will put focus on the main activities in their job description and this often are listed in KPIs.Kumar (2023) stated that task performance represents substantive responsibilities and tasks that characterized one job from another.The behaviors demonstrated by employees in order to produce goods or services is considered as the task performance, hence, it is said to vary across jobs and is influenced by their knowledge, skills and abilities (Kumar, 2023).Commonly, the activities listed in the job description are considered as the employee's task performance.
Next, contextual performance is defined as behaviour that contributes to organizational goals by supporting its social and psychological environment such as performing tasks beyond job duties and being proactive and cooperative (Kalia & Bhardwaj, 2019).Cheng and Gu (2022) stated that contextual performance is the behaviors and efforts made by employees that are not directly related to their work.It also may provide a positive outlook towards colleagues and naturally encourage them to do tasks that are not within their job scope.Contextual activities support the organizational, social, and psychological environment of task performance (Kalia & Bhardwaj, 2019).For instance, according to Aziz et al. (2020), some employees are willingly to engage in positive behaviors beyond their job requirements to help their teammates.Being a good organizational member and displaying good cooperation and teamwork are another examples of contextual performance.Lastly, Sypniewska (2020) stated that counterproductive work behavior is voluntarily acts presented by employees, whether they are conscious or not, that are harmful for the organization or its members.Spanouli et al. (2023) termed counterproductive work behaviour as the 'dark side' of employees' performance that results in critical problems in organizations.
Counterproductive work behaviour has become a common problem in organizations (Shen & Lei, 2022).Some examples of the counterproductive work behaviors include robbery, disruption verbal abuse, lying, resufe ro coordinate and physical ambush (Shao et al., 2022).On top of that, Wang et al. (2020) stated that employees chatting on WeChat during working hours, act without obeying instructions, complaining about management, frequent job hopping and reimbursement falsification are also considered as harmful to the organization and its members.Counterproductive work behaviour creates a negative environment that somehow affects employees' tasks and contextual performance as well as organizational effectiveness (Rehman & Shahnawaz, 2018).The next section will highlight a few past studies that prove the existence of the relationship between organizational culture and job performance.

Relationship between Organizational Culture and Job Performance
There are several past research that studied the relationship between organizational culture and job performance.Riatmaja et al. (2023) studied the variables in Yogyakarta, Shamsudin and Velmurugan (2023) studied the variables among IT professionals working in Kerala, Wijayanti and Tirtoprojo (2023) involved employees who work at PT Telkom Solo Raya and DIY, a study by Priyadharsan and Nithiya (2020) in Sri Lanka, Ghumiem et al. (2023) in Libya and a study conducted by Elifneh and Embilo (2023) at four research centers within Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR).All these studies involved an adequately large number of samples, that is more than 100 employees, to provide a reliable finding.Wijayanti and Tirtoprojo (2023) found a positive association between organisational culture and employee performance.A positive impact of culture was more significant towards administrative employees than technical employees in the study by Ghumiem et al., (2023).Shamsudin and Velmurugan (2023) suggested that employees' job performance might be heavily affected based on their company culture.The authors added that workplace culture is complex and may appear in many forms that are developed through the challenges faced or crafted by the company's leadership.In a study by Ferine et al. (2021), they developed four hypotheses one of which is organizational culture is positively related to job performance.Later in the findings, the hypothesis was significantly proven.It means that positive organizational culture promotion will lead to higher job performance among employees.This study automatically refutes the findings of the study by Pawirosumarto et al. (2017) which stated that organizational culture does not significantly nor positively influence employees' performance.
In addition, Ghumiem et al. (2023) demonstrate a finding that companies with a strong culture have high performer employees who are stable and committed.This is due to the fact that those employees accept the goals and values of their company and strive to make contributions based on the existing culture as the guidance which resulted in higher performance.Not only that, but companies with a strong culture also capable to innovate fresh ideas, benefit from technology advancement and develop creative abilities and processes that could be the company's competitive advantage.In conclusion, Ghumiem et al. (2023) agreed to previous studies that if the members of the company can adopt a suitable culture within the organization, it will lead to a greater positive impact on its performance.
Based on the evidence and literature from past studies where the relationship between organizational culture and job performance is indeed present, the researcher has developed a hypothesis as follows: H1: There is a relationship between organizational culture and job performance.

Methodology
The current study adopts a descriptive and correlational research design.The population involved in this study is among lower-level employees to be exact production workers of one multinational company operating in the central region of Malaysia.103 production workers from the studied multinational company were randomly recruited as the sample of the study.It was decided that the measurement for organizational culture variable was the Japanese Organizational Culture Scale (JOCS) developed by Tang et al. (2000).There are four dimensions involved in the instrument named family orientation/loyalty (F), open communication (C), team approach (T), and knowledge of managers (K).The instrument employs the 5-point Likert scale (1-disagree strongly, 2-disagree, 3-neutral, 4-agree, 5-agree strongly) for respondents to rate their point of view.Meanwhile, for job performance variable, it was measured by the Individual Work Performance Questionnaire (IWPQ) developed by Koopmans et al. (2014).This instrument comprises three dimensions which are task performance (TP), contextual performance (CP) and counterproductive work behavior (CWB).All items in IWPQ were measured using a 5-point Likert scale (0-4) which the task performance and contextual performance ranged from 'seldom', 'sometimes', 'frequently', 'often', and 'always', whereas counterproductive work behaviour is measured with a scale ranging from 'never', 'seldom', 'sometimes', 'frequently' and 'often'.
Both instruments obtained good reliability according to the result of the Alpha Cronbach test used to measure their reliability (JCOS: α = 00.943,IWPQ: α = 0.892).Descriptive statistics (i.e.mean score and standard deviation) were performed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 28.The mean value for organizational culture was described as; Low = 1.00 -2.33; Moderate = 2.34 -3.67; High = 3.68 -5.00.Meanwhile for job performance mean value was described as; Low = 0.00 -1.33; Moderate = 1.34 -2.67; High = 2.68 -4.00.On the other hand, a structural equation modelling analysis using the SmartPLS version 4.0.9.5 was conducted to investigate the relationship between organizational culture and job performance in this studied company.

Findings
The Level of Organizational Culture Table 1 presents the mean score for all dimensions of organizational culture.The mean score for the family orientation/loyalty dimension is 3.93 (SD=0.85)indicating a high level.It shows that the company respects its employees as human beings instead of just a mechanism to get tasks done and it tries to create a family-like relationship between the production workers.
Next, the open communication dimension is reported to obtain a high level too (M=3.76;SD=1.08).It implies that the managers welcome employees to ask questions and highly encourage two-way communication between them.Besides that, the team approach dimension was shown to have a mean score of 3.78 (SD=0.95).It signifies that the production workers believe the managers have been promoting collaboration among employees to work together and encourage everyone to share input and their points of view when in discussion with other team members.Furthermore, it is noted that the knowledge of managers dimension has a mean score of 3.75 (SD=1.12)demonstrating a high level.This explains that most of the employees agree that the appointed managers have adequate understanding and training, and they are capable of guiding and training other employees to gain more achievements in the company.In summary, there is a high level of organizational culture as indicated by the overall mean score (M=3.81,SD=1.00).These findings demonstrate that the studied company takes care of their employees' well-being and intrinsic motivation at high consideration, and managers in the company always motivate employees to exchange their opinions in a discussion.Besides, the manager has successfully made employees feel appreciated and valued every time they share their suggestions.Above all, the employees are clear on the organizational goals because the managers have been consistently liaising the information and delivering it to all the company's members..19 (high level).This finding proposes that the employees make sure their skills and job knowledge are updated from time to time to align with the current demands of the industry.Lastly, the counterproductive work behaviour dimension is reported to have a mean score of 3.40 (SD=1.17),demonstrating a high level of mean.It signifies that most employees face obstacles the way they are without exaggerating them and they view every situation in the workplace positively.
Strong evidence of the high level of job performance was found when the mean score ranged from 2.67 to 5 (M=3.03,SD=1.12).It signifies that the employees have clear goals of what they must achieve to meet the company's expectations and they strive to polish their jobrelated knowledge and skills to fulfill the market demands.Furthermore, most lower-level employees mentioned that they continuously seek new and unfamiliar elements as challenges in their work.Additionally, most production workers are confident to perform their jobs with very little trouble.They also stay away from making unnecessary complaints or whining about the smallest and most insignificant issues when they are at work.Farooq and Markovic (2016), Partial Least Square (PLS) is able to analyse all the constructs involved at the same time.Therefore, the PLS method is used in this study by the researchers utilizing the SmartPLS software, which is based on structural equation modelling (SEM).SEM is the second-generation multivariate data analysis method most commonly used for research in the social sciences because it can test theoretically supported linear and additional causal models (Haenlin and Kaplan, 2004).Table 3 demonstrates the findings of this study and Figure 3 illustrates the analysis of a model to measure the relationship between emotional intelligence and job performance.As highlighted by Ramayah et al. (2018), the analysis of R 2 explains the effect of the relationship between two variables.As presented in Table 3, it is noted that R 2 value of this relationship is 0.504.This means that the effect of emotional intelligence on job performance is 50.4% in this study.The t-value for this relationship is 15.487.This t-value highlights that the relationship between these two variables is significant (Ramayah et al., 2018).As a matter of fact, the hypothesis of the study is supported.It may be inferred that when the studied company has a strong organizational culture, employees are better able to behave appropriately and create higher-quality work.The results conclude that the studied company has practised a supportive organizational culture to its production workers.It indicates that the production workers are being treated rightly by the company and they are well informed by the manager on the overall company goals.Family orientation/loyalty contributes the highest mean score among the four dimensions of organizational culture.It is suggested that the production workers of the studied company feel like they are part of the organization.They feel included in the company's decision-making process and believe that their welfare is being taken care of by the company.Other than that, the dimension of the team approach recorded the secondhighest mean score.It shows that the company emphasizes team spirit, and it provides an environment where all production workers feel close to each other.This is consistent with the study by Chawla and Jain (2021) that a team cultured employees who cooperates with each other and commonly share their information will increase profitability and large group execution.
The next highest mean score was gained by the open communication dimension.It shows that the production workers feel comfortable voicing out their opinions or questions and the company is perceived to be the opposite of being controlling of its production workers.This corroborates the previous study by Ismawaty et al. (2023) that communication between organizational members has a positive and significant effect on employees' performance.The last dimension of organizational culture, which is the knowledge of managers, also recorded a high level of mean score which indicates that the production workers believed in the managers' capability and knowledge to help them advance in their careers.It is aligned with the study by Tang et al. (2000) that knowledgeable managers may offer help by acting as a mentor and guiding other employees with less experience, knowledge, and skills.

The Level of Job Performance among Lower-level Employees in one Multinational Company Operated in the Central Region of Malaysia
Besides, the findings reveal that the level of job performance among production workers in the studied company is at a high level.All dimensions of job performance recorded a high level of mean score.This implies that the production workers have little problems performing their job tasks and they continuously seek new opportunities and different adventures in their job.The highest mean score was claimed by the counterproductive work behaviour dimension.The items in this dimension were coded reversely during the data analysis process which swaps the highest score to the lowest score (0=4, 1=3, 2=2, 3=1, 4=0) as the items were originally negatively worded.The result shows that the production workers face problems raised without exaggerating the seriousness of it and they handle situations that occur within the company in a positive manner.This brought benefits to the company as its production workers do not possess worrying levels of counterproductive work behaviours that could bring problems to the company.The statement is supported by Sypniewska (2020) that counterproductive work behavior is voluntarily acts presented by employees which are harmful for the organization or its members.
The second-highest mean score was recorded by the task performance dimension.It signifies that the production workers are able to perform their tasks expertly and they have clear goals on what to achieve by the end of their performance evaluation.It is corroborated by the statement by Aslan (2022) that suggested task performance as the effectiveness and efficiency an employee has to complete his tasks and responsibilities.Lastly, the high level of contextual performance indicates that the production workers have been working to update their job skills and job-related knowledge from time to time to meet the company's needs to sustain itself in the industry.Although it is not listed in their job description that they need to update their skills and knowledge to the changing current demands, they still do so to contribute to the organization.This is aligned with the study by Cheng and Gu (2022) that contextual performance is the behaviors and efforts made by employees that are not directly related to their work.

The Relationship between Organizational Culture and Job Performance among Lower-level Employees in one Multinational Company Operated in the Central Region of Malaysia
A structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis was used to analyze the relationship between the two studied variables.The data show that organizational culture and job performance in the studied company have a significant relationship.The significant relationship moves in a positive direction which signifies that when the company has a good organizational culture, the production workers will have better job performance.This is consistent with the findings by Wijayanti and Tirtoprojo (2023) that organizational culture helps to improve job performance.However, although the study shows a significant positive correlation between organizational culture and job performance, the correlation strength is only at a moderate level.It means that although the managers have offered help in terms of training and guidance to improve production workers' performance, there are still some production workers who are unable to identify the main issue among the side issues.Nevertheless, the findings of the current study indicate that organizational culture plays a crucial function in achieving good job performance levels in a company.The results refute the findings by Pawirosumarto et al. (2017) which state that organizational culture does not significantly nor positively influence employees' performance.

Conclusion
This study set out to investigate the relationship between organizational culture and job performance among lower-level employees in one multinational company operating in the central region of Malaysia.Descriptive statistics discovered that the level of organizational culture and job performance among the lower-level employees in the studied company is at a high level.Then a deeper analysis by SmartPLS demonstrated that there is a positive and significant relationship between organizational culture and job performance in the studied company.This implies that a supportive organizational culture is regarded as a key component to managing people's performance at the workplace.An organization must set up a norm that encourages open communication between the management and its employees.In other words, this culture or norm permits the employees to provide feedback for the benefit of the business as well as themselves.Therefore, the findings of this study have filled a research gap in terms of the relationship between organizational culture and job performance, particularly in the Malaysian context.Despite the findings provided through this study, there are limitations identified during the study.In this study, the respondents of study were the lower-level employees to be exact production workers in the studied multinational company.Therefore, the results could only explain the production workers job nature.Employees with different positions might experience different levels of organizational culture although they are in the same company.
For instance, there might be new employees who feel not as attached to the company as the senior employees.Therefore, the researcher recommends future research to study different positions in manufacturing companies to identify how different the findings would be between different positions.In addition, the reliability of data will be based on the level of honesty of the respondents in answering the questionnaire.The researcher could not identify if the respondents answered truthfully based on their experience while working with the company or if they answered under external pressure from the upper management.Be that as it may, the answers were collected anonymously, which means the production workers are given more space to be honest.As a recommendation for the studied multinational company, top management needs to open more opportunities for the production workers to meet their managers to discuss performance and goals.The managers can conduct weekly meetups with every operator to update them on their progress.Moreover, the company can conduct training for necessary production workers that will focus on improving their problem-solving skills.Other than the recommendations made for the company, the researcher also provided a few recommendations for future researchers who are interested in working on this topic.For instance, future researchers may consider conducting a comparative study to make a comparison if the organizational culture in a company can affect the job performance of foreign employees as much as it affects the local employees' job performance.Also, the researcher encourages future researchers to apply a qualitative approach as their study's data collection method and conduct an interview to gain input from their samples.

Organizational Culture) M=3.81, SD=1.00 High The Level of Job Performance
Table2provides information about the mean score for all dimensions of job performance.It can be seen that the task performance dimension obtained a high level (M=3.00,SD=1.00).It means that the employees are able to get their work done excellently with minimal difficulties and they are well aware of the company's expectations that they must meet.Moreover, the mean score of the contextual performance dimension is 2.69 with a standard deviation of 1

Table 2
Findings on job performance and its dimensions

Overall Variable (Job Performance) M=3.03, SD=1.12 High The Relationship between Organizational Culture and Job Performance Statistics
from IBM SPSS version 23.0 and Smart PLS version 4.0.9.5 were used to analyse the data.According to

Table 3
Summary of analysis findings on the relationship between organisational culture and job performance Analysis of the model to measure the relationship between Organisational Culture and Job Performance