Foreign workers in Saudi Arabia: a field study of role ambiguity, identification, information-seeking, organizational support and performance

Abstract

A total of 154 foreign workers in Saudi Arabia responded to a web survey that inquired about role characteristics, work attitudes and behaviors. Surveys were matched with 138 supervisor surveys asking about the focal worker's job performance. Results indicated a significant relationship between role ambiguity and job performance, a relationship mediated by organizational identification, which was moderated by both information-seeking and perceived organizational support. This research is one of only a few studies of professional workers in Saudi Arabia (both male and female). Furthermore, this study is one of a handful of studies to explore the attitudes and performance of foreign workers, a worker population often confounded in studies that focus on domestic, expatriate or inpatriate workers.

Keywords::

• foreign workers
• information-seeking
• organizational identification
• organizational support
• role ambiguity
• Saudi Arabia
• self-initiated expatriates
• worker performance

Acknowledgment

Paper based on the dissertation of the first author, entitled: ‘Foreign workers in Saudi Arabia and their sources of adjustment: the role of supervisor and spouse support.’ J. McLean Parks, Chair. May, 2007. We would like to thank Bill Bottom, Stuart Bunderson, Ray Sparrow, Jim Little, Robert Canfield, Li Ma, Rachel Campagna and three anonymous reviewers for their help and input.

Notes

^1. We adopt the terminology ‘foreign workers’ over self-initiated expatriates to avoid possible confusion with the more commonly used meaning of the term expatriate.

^2. Governmental efforts to reduce reliance on foreign workers – referred to as saudisation – eventually may result in fewer foreign workers. While originally it was expected that foreign worker participation in the Saudi economy would fall to 20% of the non-foreign worker population by 2013 (Sadi and Henderson 2005), these goals simply do not appear to be on track: according to the Saudi government, in 2012 there were 4,840,154 non-foreign workers out of 10,751,642 total workers (Central Department of Statistics & Information, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 2012). In other words, 55% of the Saudi workforce (public and private) still is comprised of workers from other countries. Further, the norm of ‘lifetime’ employment for Saudi workers (Idris 2007) has inhibited progress toward saudisation, with nearly 80% of employers in one study reporting that they did not terminate non-performing Saudis (Al-Kibsi, Benkert and Schubert 2007). The difficulty in terminating Saudi workers has implicitly created an employer preference for hiring foreign workers, countering efforts at saudisation.