Influence of Recruitment Practice on Lecturers’ Performance in Kenyan Public Universities

Abstract

Public universities are key players in pursuit of Kenya Vision 2030’s mandate of providing globally competitive quality education, training and research to the citizenry. However, higher education stakeholders including the World Bank, Kenya’s Commission for University Education, employers and scholars have expressed misgivings regarding quality and relevance of these institution’s academic programmes. Declining quality is attributed to increased workload, reduced rigour in recruitment and promotion criteria, failure to attract and retain quality faculty, and alleged lecturers’ incompetence. Empirical studies relating recruitment practice (RP) to employee performance (EP) ignore both descriptors of RP like: examining vacancy; locating, making contact and attracting candidates as well as lecturers’ performance measures such as: quality of teaching and learning; research and publication; administration and other responsibilities; and community engagement and other contributions. The purpose of this study was to establish influence of recruitment on lecturers’ performance in Kenyan public universities. It was guided by Simon’s decision making theory and reinforced by Barney’s resource based view; Adam Smith’s human capital theory; and Herzberg’s two-factor theory. It adopted descriptive cross-sectional survey research design with a target population of 1,653 lecturers in 14 chartered public universities established between 2009 and 2019. Multi-stage purposeful sampling technique was used to finally take a census of 158 academic heads of departments (lecturers) from 13 out of the 14 universities, having used 20 in piloting. Public universities were targeted since they account for 72% of the teaching total university teaching faculty. Semi-structured questionnaires were used to collect primary data while secondary data were obtained from relevant secondary sources. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was used to examine the internal consistency at 0.796 (SD= 0.067). Whereas content validity was ascertained by reviewing literature within the domain of study concepts and corroborated by a panel of experts, construct validity was measured using Pearson’s r. Data were analyzed using Pearson’s r and regression analysis. The correlation between recruitment practice and lecturers’ performance was established to be positive and significant ( r =.324, p =.000). Recruitment practice accounted for 11.6% (Adjusted R 2 =.116) of the variation in the lecturers’ performance in Kenyan public universities. The findings are useful to the management of public universities and HRM practitioners in formulating and implementing recruitment strategies; researchers as well as organizational behaviourists and theorists. Keywords: Recruitment, lecturers’ performance, candidates’ assessment, choice and employment. DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/13-20-16 Publication date: October 31 st 2021