CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
The recent outbreak of the dreaded Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) in Nigeria placed a high demand on the work efficiency of the Port Health Services Employees in all the ports of entry to Nigeria. Employees of the Port Health Services of the Nigeria Ministry of Health were on the spotlight as it was discovered that the Virus got into Nigeria through one of her international airports owing to the inefficiency of the port health employees at the screening points. The discovery of EVD in Nigeria created a need to investigate the work efficiency of the Port Health Services arm of the Federal Ministry of Health because according to Solow (1957), efficiency can be said to be very important in organisational effectiveness.
Efficiency simply implies that an organisation has achieved the maximum amount of output that is physically achievable with current technology, and given a fixed amount of inputs (Diewert & Lawrence, 1999). Efficiency simply refers to the ability to be productive. This implies that improving efficiency is fundamental to increasing the organisations economic performance. The effort to make distribution of resources more efficient is becoming very important due to the massive growth in population. Robbins and Coulter (2005) posits that employee efficiency has been a major determinant of a good job performance. They went on to argue that efficiency is the ability to produce the most amount of output from the least amount of input. According to them, organisational effectiveness is dependent on high efficiency because efficiency is a means to meeting organisational goals. Work efficiency is a variable that has been studied as part of employee productivity until Taormina & Gao (2009) claims that work efficiency can be investigated independently of productivity. Similarly, Diewert and Lawrence (1999) claimed that Efficiency is a very important factor to consider in organisational productivity. However, efficiency of the employee depends on a number of factors such as the nature of work, the work environment, the employee personal characteristics and some environmental characteristics (Stigler, 1976) One important task for psychologists and human resources managers is how to make an employee to be efficient in order to improve the overall efficiency of the organisation and increase the organisations competitive edge in the modern economic environment. Taormina & Gao (2009) posits that organisations intending to attain high effectiveness desires high efficiency from their employees. In this regard, work efficiency being a new variable in psychological literature has not been extensively studied, however a limited number of studies such as Paul (1967) had actually introduced the concept of work efficiency in their investigations. It is noteworthy that the studies which introduced work efficiency had not actually investigated the unique contribution of psychological factors such as creativity and risk taking behaviour on efficiency.
The emergence of Ebola Virus Disease in West Africa and particularly Nigeria, requires strategies that will counter its spread. This has made the job of the Port Health Services a very important role for the nation. Port health services are concerned with disease surveillance which includes; Immunization and Issuance of International Health Certificate (Yellow Card), health response to disasters such as EVD, plane crash, bomb explosions, terrorism, boarding and inspection of ships, aircrafts and road vehicles. Similarly, port health services also carry out environmental services which includes; environmental health activities such as sanitation, pollution control, waste disposal etc, disinfection and decontamination of conveyances. At other times, port health services is concerned with provision of curative and preventive health care services including referral and laboratory service, ad-hoc activities e.g. hajj operations, screening of refugees, deportees. Due to the discovery of this virus, the job of the port health services employees became prone to risks. These employees come in contact with the virus directly or in directly and they are can also be agents of its spread. To this end, there becomes a need to investigate the risk taking behaviours of port health services employees in relation to Ebola virus disease (EVD). Specifically, a case of the dreaded ebola virus disease was reported in Nigeria in 2014. This incidence was acclaimed to have occurred to negligence and low levels of work efficiency on the part of port health services employees who were unable to detect that the carrier of the virus; Patrick Sawyer, the Liberian American who brought the virus to Nigeria through the Murtala Mohammed international airport Lagos, was actually suffering from the disease. Some Nigerians even claimed that the port health services employees were not creative otherwise the situation would have been avoided.
This assumption based on observation implies that creativity may be implicated in work efficiency. creativity is a construct that has been defined and studied by some researchers such as Albaum & Baker (1977), Amabile (1983) Zhang & Bartol (2010). However, creative traits, abilities and peoples’ belief about their creativity are different (Furnham, Zhang, & Chamorro-Premuzic, 2006). This has made the study of creativity across domains a challenge to researchers (Kaufmann, 2012). One alternative as put forth by (Kaufmann, 2012) has been to look at how people view and report their own creativity. Generally, layperson perceptions of the construct of creativity tend to be close to expert opinions (Sternberg, 1985). According to Zhang & Bartol (2010), employee creativity involves producing novel and useful ideas for organisations including processes, products and services. This has made creativity to be a very important consideration in assessing employee work efficiency and performance. Creativity provides an organisation with competitive advantage by generating, deploying, transferring, and integrating new technological knowledge (Ángel & Sánchez, 2009). Similarly, Montag, Maertz, & Baer, 2012) claims that engaging in behaviours conducive to creative outcomes is an integral part of professional role requirement. The identification of key factors that can foster, influence and sustain employee’s engagement in creative behaviours, therefore, is a major factor to consider (Manolopoulos, 2006; Zheng, Khoury, & Grobmeiher, 2010). Furthermore, the increasing challenging work environment of the 21st century has made employers to be involved in an unpredictable and technological change resulting to efficiency which is dependent on creativity (Shalley & Gilson, 2004). Thus creativity has become a very pivotal factor of interest to employers as they have realized the importance of encouraging their employees to be creative (Shalley & Gilson, 2004). Employee creativity has also been indicated in organisational outcomes such as innovation, effectiveness, efficiency and survival. (Amabile, 1996; Shalley, Zhou, & Oldham, 2004). Today more than ever, organisations are trying to blend creativity and efficiency. This is timely as it helps in productivity (Wagner, 2005).
Finally, Taormina and Gao (2009), concludes that efficiency is a means to achieve organizational goals, therefore high efficiency should be desired by management for their organizations to attain high effectiveness.