DEXTERITY TESTS SCORES AND EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE OF SEWING MACHINE OPERATORS

Abstract

Garment manufacturing plants depend highly on human labour and their performance is one of the crucial factors that stimulate the well-being of the organization. These garment factories concentrate greatly on recruiting and selecting appropriate employees. The selected garment factory highly focuses on dexterity tests to check the competence of employees at the recruitment stage. Based on their actual performance, it is doubtful whether these current dexterity tests have a significant ability to predict operator performance. The core purpose of this study is to examine the job performance prediction ability of current dexterity tests used for employee selection. Seventy-six experienced sewing machine operators were re-tested for four types of current dexterity tests – Marble, Pin board, Cards and Puzzle – and the scores were compared with their actual performance. Correlation and regression analyses were used to analyze the research data and only 14% of the variation in work performance was explained by dexterity test scores as per the findings. There is no relationship or impact shown between dexterity tests and performance. Thus, the study shows that no significant job performance prediction could be seen through the current dexterity tests practiced at present by the garment factory.