The Impact of Workplace Environments on Retention Outcomes of Public Universities in Southern Nigeria

Abstract

Universities, across the globe, are identified as complex and critical engines for sustainable development. Nigerian universities have recorded success stories and breakthroughs, but they have their teething problems of retention and challenges which tend to impede their position on the world education league table. Retention of employees in the work environment has attracted a lot of attention from scholars in different fields of study to curb the trend of turnover intentions, human capital flight and redundancy of academia in Nigeria. Hence, this paper investigates the impact of workplace environments on the retention of the academic staff of public universities, Southern-Nigeria. The study adopted a cross-sectional and descriptive approach to elicit information from 384 academic staff that were randomly and purposively selected. The use of a modified questionnaire (quantitative) was adopted. The quantitative data were analysed using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM_PLS) to obtain results. The findings indicated that the issue of inadequate and decay of infrastructural facilities had been a concern to the sampled universities. Many lecturers, including professors, shared offices that are dilapidated, poorly ventilated and furnished. The results indicated an increasing pauperization, varying promotion criteria, erratic power supply, over-congested classrooms and a growing disparity in the ratio between teaching staff and students. Due to its consequences, strategies for curbing this menace in state universities, such as the creation of enabling environment, adequate funding of tertiary education, effective administration and motivation of staff of the sampled institutions, among others were proffered.

Leadership dimensions, employee engagement and job performance of selected consumer-packaged goods firms

“…Various issues including, environmental pollution, customers' dissatisfaction, low productivity and incessant labour unrests, operational inefficiency, regulatory sanctions, alleged poor welfare packages and hostile community-industry relationships (Ohunakin et al, 2016; O. Salau et al, 2020) have continued to generate discussions on the need for effective leadership style and engagement in the manufacturing industry. In fact, Robert et al (2015) are of the opinion that the manufacturing firms have over the years failed to adequately address most of the issues identified above.…”

Determinants of retention strategies and sustainable performance of academic staff of government-owned universities in Nigeria

“…Table 3 showed the distribution of biographical data of the respondents in terms of gender, current rank/status, work experience and highest education. Individual-level results from each participant are available as Underlying data (Salau et al, 2020). Table 1 on demographic characteristics revealed that majority of the respondents were predominantly male (60.2%) and majority of the respondents fall within Lecturer II (representing 45%).…”

“…The composite reliability (CR) was used to check for data reliability. Reliability was achieved when the alpha coefficients are above the threshold value of 0.7 which indicates an acceptable level 34 . All CR values were above 0.7, suggesting that all indicative objects are accurate and acceptable.…”

“…https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12624410.v2 (Salau et al, 2020). This project contains the following underlying data:…”

“…Added to all these human failings, the environment in many of the universities in Nigeria is unfavorable 25 and not conducive to good curriculum delivery, or indeed, any form of teaching and learning 26 . Students are overcrowded in rooms with some hanging on to windows where ventilation is poor 27 , or flock around shades in the open. Electricity, enabling comfort, skills acquisition or laboratory work, is often absent, public address systems inadequate and digital technology to assist with knowledge transfer and interactive sessions -internet access, smart boards -absent in many institutions 26 .…”