Mentorship Culture and Academic Staff Job Effectiveness in Public Universities in North-Central Nigeria

Abstract

The study examined the extent to which mentoring prgrammes encourage job effectiveness of public University lecturers in North-central Nigeria. The study utilized the survey method of research to sample opinion of respondents for the study. The population of this study consists of all the seven thousand seven hundred and forty seven (7747) academic staff members and two hundred and fifty three thousand eight hundred and seventy two (253872) students working and studying in the thirteen public Universities and the Federal Capital Territory in North-central Nigeria. The sample of 501 lecturers from two Universities was used. This was based on Yamene (1967) formula for sampling. Data was collected using the ‘Academic Staff Mentorship Programme Questionnaire (ASMPQ) for lecturers and Academic Staff Effectiveness Questionnaire (ASEQ) for students. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions and the Pearson correlation was used to test the hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance. The result showed that there is a significant relationship between job effectiveness of academic staff and University mentoring programmes in public Universities in North-central Nigeria. The findings also revealed that mentorshipprogrammes for lecturers have positive influence on their job effectiveness. The study recommends that the University management should as a matter of policy develop and carry out mentorship programme strategy for junior academic staff to inbuilt it as an important skills learning tool for job effectiveness policy.

Keywords: Mentorship, Culture, Academic Staff, Job Effectiveness and North Central Universities