Incentives and job performance of academic staff in Rivers State universities, Nigeria

The study examined the relationship between incentives and job performance of academic staff in Rivers State universities, Nigeria, with focus on rewards, conducive work environment and professional development. Three research questions and three null hypotheses guided the study, which adopted the correlational research design. The population comprised 1,971 lecturers, made up of 1,585 lecturers in Rivers State University and 386 lecturers in Ignatius Ajuru University of Education, from which a sample of 332 lecturers was determined with the Taro Yamane formula and drawn through the proportionate stratified and simple random sampling techniques, giving 267 lecturers from Rivers State University and 65 from Ignatius Ajuru University of Education. Data were collected with two instruments, the Incentives Questionnaire (IQ) and the Job Performance Questionnaire (JPQ), which were validated by three experts and gave Cronbach Alpha coefficients of 0.84, 0.87 and 0.85 for the rewards, work environment and professional development clusters and 0.892 for the JPQ. The Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient was used to answer the research questions, while the t-transformation of the correlation coefficient was used to test the null hypotheses at the 0.05 level of significance. The findings revealed a very strong positive relationship between rewards and job performance of academic staff (r = 0.82), a strong positive relationship between conducive work environment and job performance (r = 0.68) and a strong positive relationship between professional development and job performance (r = 0.74), and all three relationships were significant. The study concluded that rewards, a conducive work environment and professional development are incentives that go hand in hand with the job performance of academic staff in Rivers State universities. It was recommended, among others, that the management of Rivers State universities should run fair, transparent and timely reward systems and sponsor academic staff regularly to conferences, workshops and training programmes.