PERSONAL AND WORK- RELATED FACTORS AS PREDICTORS OF CAREER GROWTH OF JUNIOR ACADEMIC STAFF IN UNIVERSITIES IN SOUTHWESTERN, NIGERIA

Abstract

Academic and administrative responsibilities assigned to junior academic staff though crucial to their career growth, are largely becoming challenging and inimical to their overall career achievements in Nigeria. Previous studies on career growth in the Nigerian university system have concentrated more on remunerations, job satisfaction and commitment, staff welfare and incentives, funding and retention, organisational climate and career pathways without adequate consideration for the combined predictive effects of personal and work-related factors. Therefore, this study examined the combined prediction of personal (emotional intelligence and gender) and work-related (work attitude, administrative responsibility and mentoring) factors on junior academic staff career growth (Readiness for Promotion (RP), Number of Publications (NoP), Regular Class Attendance (RCA), Teaching Ability (TA) and Self-confidence (SC)) in universities in Southwestern Nigeria. The descriptive survey research design was adopted. Equal allocation method and stratified random sampling techniques were used to select 1200 junior academic staff from 12 purposively selected universities (four each from federal, state and private). Junior Academic Career Growth Scale (r=0.78), Administrative Responsibility (AR) Inventory (r=0.81), Work Attitude (WA) Scale (r=0.85), Emotional Intelligence (EI) Scale (r=0.82) and Mentoring Scale (r=0.81) were used for data collection. These were complemented with four sessions of in-depth interview with four randomly selected junior academic staff in each of the 12 institutions; making a total of 48 sessions. One research question was answered and six hypotheses tested at 0.05 level of significance. Data were subjected to Pearson product movement correlation, multiple regression and content analysis. Personal and work-related factors had a joint significant prediction on junior academic staff career growth (JASCG) (F(5,1194) =116.47) and jointly accounted for 33.0% of its variance. Emotional intelligence (β=0.355), gender (β=0.128), AR (β=0.074), WA (β=0.056) relatively contributed to JASCG, while mentoring did not. Also, EI (r=0.531), gender (r=0.430), mentoring (r=0.416), WA (r=0.326) and AR (r=0.224) positively correlated with JASCG. Administrative responsibilities significantly correlated with the components of JASCG as follows: TA (r=0.218), NoP (r=0.145), RCA (r=0.132), SC (r=0.130), and RP (r=0.115); while work attitude correlated with the same components as ranked: NoP (r=0.338), SC (r=0.369), RP (r=0.343), RCA (r=0.295) and TA (r=0.265). Further, EI correlated with JASCG components in this order: NoP (r=0.047), SC (r=0.025), TA (r=0.025), RCA (r= -0.56), RP (r=-0.34). Mentoring also correlated with JASCG as ranked: NoP (r=0.209), TA (r=0.146), SC (r=0.143), RCA (r=0.135), RP (r=0.112). The junior academic staff can always cope with the rigour of academics and constantly experience ease career growth without much hindrance under good work environment, flexible work system, better mentoring system and high level of intelligence. Administrative responsibilities, work attitude, emotional intelligence and gender positively predicted the career growth of junior academic staff in universities in Southwestern Nigeria. There is, therefore, the need for the university management to provide enabling work environment that can enhance the right work attitude and emotional stability of the junior academic staff for them to perform optimally. In addition, there is the need to ensure an effective formal mentoring system and reduction of excessive workload.