Work environment, leadership style, reward system, and research productivity of academic librarians in South-west Nigeria

Research plays a pivotal role in expanding human understanding and driving societal progress. This study investigated the individual and joint influence of work environment, leadership style and reward system on librarians’ research productivity in public university libraries in South-west Nigeria. By anchoring the inquiry in three complementary theories namely person-environment fit theory, contingency theories, and expectancy theory, this paper formulated a conceptual model that linked three independent variables to a dependent variable. The population for this study involved 279 academic librarians from 30 university libraries. When work environment, leadership style, and reward system were put together, they jointly accounted for 30% of the variance in research productivity. Notably, only work environment retained a significant individual effect in the full model. The study’s theoretical contribution demonstrates that the three theories are not isolated lenses but intersect in predicting research productivity. The study’s recommendation is that an efficient reward system should be designed in a fitting work environment to intensify publishing.