Professional motivation and lived experiences: a determinant of lecturers' job (dis)satisfaction in Nigerian public universities

This thesis investigates why lecturers choose a teaching career as a professional motivation andtheir experiences working in public Nigerian universities in order to determine their sources of job(dis)satisfaction. This is a qualitative study and adopts a phenomenological method, within aninterpretivist paradigm. It uses phenomenological interviews to gather data from twelve lecturers fromtwo public universities in port Harcourt southern Nigeria and uses thematic analysis to analyse the data.The emergent themes revealed that lecturers’ predominant motivation for entering the teachingprofession is to make an impact on students’ life, while their experiences working in the publicuniversity sector involves sectoral challenges and flexibility. In terms of the sectoral challenges theyexperienced, four themes emerged as follows: salary issues, corruption, lack of development, poorworking conditions, facilities, and environment. Whereas in terms of flexibility, two themes emerged:flexible employment and work flexibility. While their experiences working in the public universitysector reveal that lecturers are highly dissatisfied due to the negativities of dealing with the sectoralchallenges, they are on the other hand, derive satisfaction from impacting students’ lives as a way ofcontributing to their success and the society which was their predominant motive for choosing a careerin teaching.The findings showed that expectations of lecturers advocate the government to ensure positivechanges in public education by: (1) increasing funding, pay and pension, (2) government to supportthem for research and development, (3) improve work environment and conditions and (4) implementpolicies that will develop education. This study contributes to knowledge by extending the sources ofjob (dis)satisfaction of Nigerian lecturers and highlights possible experiences and sectoral challengesthat potential lecturers and teachers may come across therefore give a foresight of their careerexpectations. It also fills a methodological gap in determining lecturers’ job satisfaction within theNigerian higher education literature therefore contributes to the studies of Egbule, (2003) and Umaruand Ombugus, (2017).