Academic staff mentoring as a correlate of job performance among new entrants in HEI

Abstract

This study is motivated primarily by an emerging trend observed in the Nigerian HEIs i.e., the changing workforce demographics, with its attendant consequences on educational standards. Considering the available evidences supporting the influence of mentoring on job performance in other sectors, these researchers found it worthwhile to investigate the mentoring practices in Nigerian HEIs to ascertain the relationship between mentoring and job performance of newly employed academic staff. The objectives of the study are: (1) determine the current mentoring practices in Nigerian HEIs; (2) ascertain the relationship between academic staff mentoring and job performance (proxied by task performance, contextual performance, and counterproductive work behavior) of newly employed academic staffs; and (3) determine the most appealing and effective mentoring strategies for optimizing the job performance of newly employed academic staffs. Given the objective of the study, –to ascertain the relationship between mentoring and job performance of newly employed academic staff– a correlational research design was employed in the study. A sample of 60 academic staff was drawn from a population of 182 newly employed academic staff of the Federal College of Education (Technical) Umunze. Mentoring was found to be significantly (and positively) correlated with task performance and contextual performance of newly employed academic staffs, whereas the relationship between mentoring and counterproductive work behavior was not significant. Other interesting findings from the descriptive statistics tests are also reported. Among the recommendations put forward is the need to establish a formal mentoring programme as part of the integration process of newly employed academic staff in the higher educational institutions in Nigeria.