Organisational Factors as Predictors of Research Productivity: Evidence from Selected Universities in Uganda

Abstract

The pivotal role that research play in knowledge generation within higher education institutions has attracted the attention of many scholars. These have mainly looked at ways of improving research productivity in such institutions. In this study, the aim was to examine whether organisational variables in Bean’s model jointly predict research productivity of a PhD-holding academic staff member in a university in Uganda. The organisational variables were university research emphasis, university reputation, university size, university affluence, and university autonomy. Employing a positivist approach and using a predictive, cross-sectional survey design, 217 PhD-holding academic staff members from three universities in Uganda, namely, Bishop Stuart University, Makerere University, and Uganda Christian University provided data by completing SAQs. We tested the study hypotheses using both Pearson’s linear correlation and standard multiple linear regression. Both bivariate and multivariate results indicated that there was no significant prediction between research productivity and the organisational variables. We concluded that the organisational variables in Bean’s model do not jointly significantly positively predict research productivity of a PhD-holding academic staff. Because the prediction of research productivity by most of the organisational variables individually were not statistically significant, we recommend that university administrators address these factors in unison to enhance research productivity of their PhD-holding academic staff