Inefficiency Among Non-Academic Staffs in Nigerian Tertiary Institutions: the Role of Training and Development

Abstract

Inefficiency has been a major issue battling the service delivery of non-academic staff in most public universities in Nigeria and this has greatly affected the academic and research outlook of Nigerian universities. Interest in the study was to determine the extent to which induction, demonstration, on-the-job and formal training which are all elements of employee training and development enhance managerial efficiency by looking at employee productivity and quality of service delivery. The study adopts a convenience and stratified sampling technique to select 293 non-academic staffs in selected public universities in Nigeria and the analysis was carried out using the structural equation model (SEM). The results revealed that on-the-job training has a significant negative relationship with the quality of service delivery in Nigerian universities (t=-4.454), (p<0.05) and beta=-0.20) which could be because most Nigerian universities do not deliberately place new employees to learn directly from a current employee in order to improve their performance. Hence, the study demonstrates that the only way to resolve inefficiency among non-academic (administrative) staff in public tertiary institutions is to integrate effective training into employee career management and adopt employee performance evaluation process as contained in the private organizations.