Work Environment and Employee Performance in the Public Service: A Study of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University, Anambra State, Nigeria (Published)
This work examines the effect of work environment on employee performance in Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University. It equally aims at ascertaining whether the social environment affect the productivity of workers of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University. In other to properly articulate the work, data was gotten from both the primary and secondary sources of data collection such as questionnaires, interviews, journals, periodicals, textbooks etc. The tables and percentages where used to display the data while the, chi-square was used in its analysis. Taro Yamane’s sample size determination was adopted to arrive at one hundred and fifty (150) as our sample size. Victor Vrooms Valence Expectancy theory was adopted as the theoretical framework of analysis. Based the foregoing, the study revealed that COOU’s working environment had an impact on members as far as the respondents are concerned. By implication, the institution needs to improve its physical working environment so that to influence employees to stay in the office, work comfortable and perform their job. It was recommended among other things that; Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University should have a good program in place for their employees work life balance as this can be a great factor to motivate and retain them. Management should try as much as possible to build a work environment that attracts, retain and motivate its employees so that to help them work comfortable and increase organization productivity; Employers should have in place a good working condition for their employees in order to boost their morale and made them more efficient. Finally, management should find ways and means of communicating their goals and strategies to their employees in order to achieve what the organization is in business for, its mission and vision.
Keywords: Employee Performance, Productivity, Public Service, Work Environment
Enhancing Public Personnel Competence Through Training: The Role Of Public Service Institute Of Nigeria (PSIN) (Published)
Improving the competence level of public personnel is very imperative for efficient service delivery. Governments world over has as its key objective the rendering of prompt and efficient services to its citizens and at the same time be as accountable and transparent as possible while carrying out these responsibilities. For a government to fulfil its objective to its citizens it must ensure that its workforce is well and able to live up to the demands of fulfilling these objectives. This cannot be achieved without a competent, efficient, effective and result-oriented public service. The public service is constantly evolving with increasing service delivery demands from the citizens. The importance of equipping public servants with the right training to satisfy the citizens’ demands can only be met when the public servants have the required competence to meet these challenges. This paper relied on documented secondary data as its source of data collection and adopted the qualitative review analysis as its methodology. The paper also used the Expertise Theory as the framework for explaining how public personnel competence can be enhanced through training and human resource capacity building. Constant training and human capacity building development have been proved to be the best, widely accepted and most efficient solution to the problem of enhancing competence in the Nigerian public service. This is inview of the importance of constant training and human resource capacity building as expressed by scholars and the Nigerian government in various committee reports, recommendations, and White papers on public service reforms. The focus of this paper is to examine the role of Public Service Institute of Nigeria in enhancing public personnel competence in the public service. The findings show poor funding and lack of political will on the part of the government to implement several reform recommendations on public personnel training. The paper therefore, recommends increased funding of the Institute and enhanced political commitment to address the training needs in the public service.
Keywords: Public Service, Training, personnel competence
Public Administration and the Collapse of Probity And Good Governance in Nigeria: The Impact Of Political Superstructure. (Published)
Emerging from the vestiges of over one hundred years of imperial rule, the Nigerian public administration system has experienced significant transformation to secure a place of pride in the general discourse on governance. However, the stream of political developments that brought the system into sharp focus and relevance has been as challenging to the public service as they are instructive in intellectual reflections. For example, in the growing literature on the collapse of probity and good governance in Nigeria, the public service has been severely scored on account of its failure to provide the required institutional grounding for good governance. While not absorbing the political class of culpability for this failure, the general assessment of the leadership question in Nigeria has been heavily skewed against the bureaucracy. The paper seeks to deconstruct this notion and argues that the political superstructure is largely responsible for the governance failure, and that the public service under the suffocating grip of its political master has only managed to maintain its going concern within the context of political instability, policy inconsistency, and the lack of political accountability in the last fifty years of public administration. The analysis is predicated on the politics – administration dichotomy as its theoretical framework. This approach provides tremendous insight into the nature and character of interaction between the political class and the administrative class on the basis of which deductions are made and conclusion drawn. In the final analysis, two recommendations stand out among others; a call for legislative activism sufficient enough to institutionalise a culture of political and managerial accountability and a call for policy consistency sufficient enough to sustain and drive the current reforms of the public service to its logical ends
Keywords: Accountability, Administration, Governance, Politics, Public Service