Abstract:
The construction sector is very dynamic and provides thousands of jobs and supports the national economy of Bahrain. This study investigates the impact of human resource policies on the performance of construction organizations in Bahrain using the Baron-Kenny method. This method gives the direct and indirect effect between human resource policies and organizational performance where the employee performance is used as a mediator. A self-administrated questionnaire is developed and validated where the study is conducted on a simple random sampling of 154 construction employees with a response rate of about 38 percent. The results are shown that there is a direct and indirect statistically significant impact of human resource policies on the performance of construction organizations. In the existence of the mediator in the model, the indirect effect of human resource policies on the performance of construction organizations is more than double the direct effect. Moreover, the mediation effect of employee performance is confirmed using the Sobel test. Furthermore, the performance of construction organizations was found to be influenced by human resource policies and not by demographics and other attributes that have no significant impact as per the results of this study. The partial least squares analysis shows that training, health and safety, and compliance are the most important variables while continuous improvement, recruitment, business support, communication, and change management are the least important variables. This study adds to few studies that have empirically inspected a global model of employee performance as a mediator in the construction sector and considers one of the few of its type undertaken in Bahrain's construction sector context. Recommendations were also provided for improving construction organizations and their employees in line with the study results. However, this study has limitations that can be utilized for future studies including the small sample size and the difficulty of accessing data from construction organizations.