TYPE OF CONTRACTORS IN NIGERIA CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY

TYPE OF CONTRACTORS IN NIGERIA CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY

The following are the two types of contractors in Nigeria construction industry:
1. Indigenous Contractors
2. Foreign Contractors

Indigenous Contractors

This is the type of contractors that are Nigerian whether he/she trained in Nigeria or not.Most Indigenous Contractor are owned and managed by sole trader type entrepreneurs with little knowledge of the workings of the Nigeria Construction Industry.

They operate largely in the informal sector of the economy and are usually small, unregistered, labour intensive and their workers are unprotected. They often don’t have premises, equipment or permanent workforce.

The Indigenous Contractor are known for their short-term orientation and unwillingness to employ qualified personnel. This explains the lack of corporate approach to management(Ofori, 1991; Wells, 2001).

This casual nature of employment in the Indigenous Contractor have affected long term plan for the workers. This invariably, affects the motivation and incentive provision by the management to workers and hence poor productivity. On the average, craftsmen receive little or no recognition for their efforts.

However, Fagbenle, (2009) finds that non-financial incentives to be more employed by management of in Indigenous Contractor Nigeria and that the applied non-financial incentives had significant positive effect on worker performance.

Foreign Contractors

These are contractors who are not Nigerians but come to work in Nigeria.Multinational Corporations [MNC] in Nigeria are normally characterized by structured management, huge capital base, wider area of network and cut across various sectors of the economy including construction (Amao, 2008).

One of the basic features of MNCs is that they have well managed human capital bases that are responsible for carrying out the various activities of their corporations. The personnel in MNCs are well motivated with various incentives schemes to boost the commitment of their workers. Incentive design and plan of the MNCs are in long, medium and short terms.

The long term incentive plan runs for a good number of years and may be in form of free flight for an employee for ten years. The short terms are mostly financial in nature, like bonuses and the medium term are an intermediate between the long and short term incentive plan and can be the promotion of workers. MNCs usually adopt incentive plan builder which is a step-by-step, on-line incentive plan design tool for managers (Olusola, 1999).

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