MANAGEMENT OF PUBLIC REAL ESTATE FACILITIES: THE MEDIATION OF OUTSOURCING ON STANDARDS, EFFICIENCY AND LONGEVITY
KAZEEM BOLAYEMI AKINBOLA AND TOLUWALASE GREGORY, Volume 3 Issue 1, 2020 Pages 59-79, Published: 2020-09-25
Abstract
There are growing concerns among facilities stakeholders, which have compelled them to embrace outsourcing as a veritable tool of solving myriads of deficiencies, with which other traditional management strategies of yester-decades that were devised for managing facilities were shrouded. Hence, what remains a gap among other things, is the exactitude of the impacts of outsourcing strategy on the management of public real estate facilities, in terms of standard of delivery of FM functions and tasks, efficiency of resources being used to deliver the FM functions and most importantly the longevity of various FM outcomes, as they border on sophistication of the FM outputs and the levels of satisfaction to all stakeholders, especially users and owners of public facilities and finally the extent of durability of the FM outcomes. It is in a bid to investigate this situation, that this study was conducted. Quantitative approach was employed through administration of 390 copies of questionnaire among directly concerned individuals, such as owners, users, operators, controllers, supervisors and senior officials as well as indirectly concerned individuals, such as outsourced facilities management consultants and main / sub-contractors of 35 different federal and state owned real estate facilities, spanning educational and medical use types, across the six states of the southwestern Nigeria. A total of 346 copies of questionnaire were retrieved, translating to 88.72% of distribution-retrieval rate, out of which a total 331 copies of questionnaire were found to be valid. This research made use of smart PLS version 2.0 sandwiched with AMOS’ structural equation modelling version 18.0 for analysing the data. The results showed amongst other things that all the 5 structural paths that were theorized and hypothesized for all the four variables, which are outsourcing, delivery standards, resource efficiency and longevity of FM outcomes are positively significant directionally at 99.5% confidence level, with cronbach alpha value of 0.979 and model estimate 0.985 for resource efficiency being the Ilaro Journal of Environmental Research & Development (2019) (3), (1) 59 – 79 Akinbola, K. B., & A Publication of the School of Environmental Studies, The Federal Polytechnic Ilaro variable with the highest interrelationship with outsourcing at p value of 0.013 which resultantly mediate the duo of standards of delivery and resource efficiency and thus impacts positively on the longevity of FM outcomes. The study concluded that the mediating impacts of the contemporary strategy of outsourcing on the standards of FM services that are being delivered, together with the efficiency of resources that are being employed for FM operations, as well as resultant potency on the longevity of FM outcomes are discernible and full of promise into having an expanding benefits to public real estate facilities for decades to come. Finally, it was recommended among other things that efforts should be made at making public facilities solution providers to be more compliant of statutory provisions, with a view to ensuring that outsourced facilities operations are carried out to standards, thus sustaining the efficiency of resources and ultimately longevity of FM outcomes.