INFLUENCE OF JOB INCENTIVES ON LOB PERFORMANCE OF NON-ACADEMIC STAFF IN UNIVERSITY OF CALABAR
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the study
Nowadays, many institutions use some kind of incentives to motivate their employees which will lead to increase in job performance. Job performance assesses whether a person performs a job well. Job performance is also the way employees perform their work, fulfill assigned task, through efforts and skills. Job performances are also an important criteria for organizational outcomes and success. The success and the survival of any organization are determined by the way the workers are remunerated and rewarded (Lawler,2003). Reward is another factor that enhanced commitment and influence worker’s performance. Reward system and motivating incentives will determine the level of employees’ commitment and their attitude to work, as well as their performances, in order to attain educational goals.
Education according to the nation policy on education is an instrument “par excellence” which is important for national development (FGN 2004). Education is also the bed rock of any nation’s socio-economical institutions (tertiary institution) in Nigeria are created to offer services significantly to the development and growth of the society (Udida, Bassey, Udofia and Egbona, 2009). The national policy on education as cited in Olujuwan(2009), specified that tertiary educational institutions in Nigeria are to attain the goal of contributing to National development through relevant high level manpower training, developing and inculcating proper values for the survival of the individuals to understand and appreciate their local and external environment, promoting and encouraging scholarship and community service, forging and cementing national unity and promoting national and international understanding and interaction and acquiring both physical and intellectual skills, which will enable individuals to be self-reliant and useful members of the society. The tertiary institution management can achieve effective job performance by non-academic staff through employee incentive packages; good remuneration (pay) which will increase their employee Job-performance and thereby increase the organization productivity and delivering of service as established by Maimona(2011) that no other inducement or motivational method comes close to cash. These goals depict that universities are to embark on teaching, research and development of programmes with minimum educational standards, with the aid of non-academic staff.
Non-academic staff are people employed by a school system who do not serve as academic staff. Non-academic are employees within an academic environment whose job do not involve teaching. This can include administrative staff, guidance counselors, service providers, custodians, food service personnel and even transportation workers. Non Academic Staff plays a necessary and important role in support of education of student as well as positively contributing to the objectives of the school. Non-academic staff performance fundamentally depend on many factors like monetary benefits, recognition, feedback, participation, performance appraisal, compensation, staff satisfaction, training and developing organizational structure, job security and staff motivation. Halepota (2005) defines motivation as a person’s active participation and commitment to achieve the prescribed result. It could also be seen as the internal and external factors that stimulates or drives people to be continually interested and also committed to a job, or to make an effort to attain a goal. Getting employees to do their job well even in strenuous circumstance is made possible through motivation which comes in form of incentives.
Incentive refers to something (monetary and non-monetary) that is intended to ignite one or call for greater efforts to act in a given manner. Incentive also refers to an inducement that is given to a worker in order to motivate, encourage and maintain a desired behaviour(Allen &Kilmann,2001). According to Hicks and Adams (2003), incentives are mechanisms aimed at achieving a specific change in behavior. Whereas performance refers to how well an employee fulfills assigned task through effort and skills, an incentive refers to an inducement for a desired action.
Incentive pay is a form of compensation given to employees upon attainment of some form of job performance (Armstrong, 2009). Organizations have resorted into the adoption of relevant and appropriate incentives in order to encourage employees to elicit their best skills while increasing their efforts (Yap, 2009). Various forms of incentives plans are offered to employees, such as commission and bonus awards. Similarly, Franco, Hartmann, and Pool(2002) identified incentives as a means applied by the employer so as to influence the workers willingness to exert and maintain effort towards attaining goals of the institution.
In their quest to achieve set targets, some tertiary institutions make provision for effective and appropriate incentives to motivate their employees. Incentives are used by organizations in order to encourage a certain behavior and team spirit for collective awards. Incentives systems are not universally applicable but are likely to play a role in enhancing individual effort or performance where -the conditions and the scheme designed are right (Manjunath& Rajesh, 2012). Both monetary such as salaries, wages, bonuses, allowances and non-monetary incentives as recognition, monetary benefits, feed backs among others can be used. However, it has been shown that non-monetary incentives are proving themselves as being more effective tools in the workplace than the non-monetary incentives (Nolan, 2012 &Priyce, 2011).
Furthermore, the status of Non Academic Staff “includes Accountants, Auditors, Secretaries, Clerical staffs, securities, cleaners, sport personnel, Administrators, Technologists, hostel portals among others.
The job performance of non-academic staff in University of Calabar is no doubt below the average status. This is due to a number of factors ranging from poor reward (incentives) systems to the outrageous volume of tasks due to the few hands employed. For instance, in bursary the number of staff carrying out duties or performing their job is limited as compared to the number of students who they attend to on daily basis. This will lead to fatigue on the part of the workers because the volume of work to be carried out is tedious and few hands are there to carry out this work. Also, in the general offices of departments, workers job performance has been worsened due to the absence of basic energy and time serving devices such as ICT gadgets, which they are not exposed to, or which are not made available for work to be carried out speedily and on time. However, this study aims at determining the influence of job incentives on job performance of non-academic staff of university of Calabar.
INFLUENCE OF JOB INCENTIVES ON LOB PERFORMANCE OF NON-ACADEMIC STAFF IN UNIVERSITY OF CALABAR. DEPARTMENT OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION
