INTRA-ORGANISATIONAL HUMAN FACTORS’ FUNCTIONS AND ACTIVITIES AS CORRELATES OF GOAL ATTAINMENT OF PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES IN SOUTHWESTERN NIGERIA

Abstract

Goal Attainment (GA), the successful mobilisation of human and other resources to achieve the institution objectives, is indicated by teaching, research and community service. However, anecdotal evidence has shown that Nigeria’s public universities has low GA resulting in poor quality of graduates, skills’ mismatch and low research outputs. Previous studies have focused largely on nonhuman factors (financial, environmental and institutional autonomy) with little emphasis on intraorganisational human factors such as Management Functions –MF (planning, organizing, leading and controlling), Staff Union Activities (SUA) and Students’ Union Government Activities (SUGA). This study, therefore, was design to investigate MF, SUA, SUGA as correlates of GA in public universities in southwestern Nigeria. The study was premised on the Open System Theory, while the mixed methods (Quan,+qual) design was adopted. The six federal universities in southwestern Nigeria were enumerated, while one state university with over five years of establishment in each state was purposively selected. The 76 principal officers and 100 deans in all 12 selected universities were enumerated, while 400 heads of departments (four in each faculty 400) were randomly selected. The president, secretary, treasurer, publicity secretary and one trustee of the four existing staff unions in each university were purposively selected, while the president, secretary, publicity secretary, speaker of the students’ representative council and chief justice of the students’ judiciary council in each university were purposively selected making 1376 respondents. Instruments used were GA (r=0.87), MF (planning r=0.87, organising r=0.89, leading r=0.88 and controlling r=0.85) scales, SUGA (r=0.90) and SUA (r=0.83) questionnaires. These were complemented. In-depth interviews were conducted with three principal officers, six deans and eight union chairmen/secretaries. Quantitative data were subjected to descriptive statistics, Pearson product moment correlation and Multiple regression at 0.05 level of significance, while the qualitative data were content-analysed. Respondents’ age was 42.32±9.06 years and 72.2% were male. The GA (𝑥̅=3.79), Planning- 𝑥̅=4.43; Organising-𝑥̅=4.43; Learning- 𝑥̅=4.71; Controling- 𝑥̅=3.87; SUGA-𝑥̅= 4.19 and SUS- 𝑥̅= 4.01 were high against the threshold of 3.00. Leading (r=0.87), planning (r=0.66), organising (r=0.66), SUA (r=0.56), SUGA (r=0.55) and controlling (r=0.50) had significant relationships with GA. There was a significant joint contribution of the internal human factors to GA (F(4,195)=413.27; Adj R2=0.892); accounting for 89.2% of its variance. Leading (β=0.62), SUGA (β=0.37), controlling (β=0.29), organizing (β=0.19), SUA (β=0.13) and planning (β=0.13) made significant relative contributions to GA. Management functions conflicts with SUA and SUGA. Also, community service is an essential function of universities, but little attention and priority was paid to it, and this affected the impact the universities had on the larger society. Leading, students’ union government activities, controlling, organizing, staff union activities and planning influenced goal attainment of public universities in Southwestern Nigeria. Therefore, stakeholders should give more attention to these human factors to facilitate goal attainment in the Nigeria universities.