Perceived Leaders’ Empathy, Recognition, Monetary Compensation and Employees’ Happiness Among Universities’ Academicians

Abstract

The Covid-19 virus is not only hazardous to human health but to the country’s economic condition too (Choong, 2020). The financial setback has led to many universities’ employees, including the academicians, from getting the amount of salary or compensation commensurate with their amount of works (Sunil, 2020). This situation has produced many unhappy academicians which eventually steered to the deterioration of the overall universities’ performance (Raj, 2021). Besides the salary factor, the unhappiness is also due to their leaders’ attitude that was criticised to be self-centred, unappreciative, and only prone towards the universities’ profit generation alone (Tatjana, 2021). The universities’ employees’ happiness issues are deemed to become more alarming, when the world is attacked by the Covid-19 virus since end of year 2019 (Isa & Palpanadan, 2020). Therefore, this study was conducted to examine the relationship between perceived leaders’ empathy, recognition, money compensation and employees’ happiness among the academicians from all private universities in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor. The empirical findings from this study revealed that monetary compensation possesses the most significant relationship with employees' happiness (p-value = 0.00; T-value = 6.51), followed by perceived leaders' empathy and employees' happiness (p-value = 0.00; T-value = 4.126). Recognition was found to have no significant relationship with employees’ happiness (p-value> 0.05; T-value = 0.429). The empirical findings are expected to be a basic source of reference for employers, leaders, and human resource practitioners, especially from the Malaysian private universities on the importance of ensuring all employees receive monetary compensation that is appropriate with the efforts and sacrifices given. In addition, leaders also need to be more empathy and understanding towards their employees since this value will foster a sense of belonging among employees while creating employment sustainability that has proven to help many organisations to be more successful (Oruh et al., 2021).