Staff development programs and job performance: Implications for productivity in Lagos state ministry of education

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1 Journal of Business Administration and Management Sciences Research Vol. 2(12), pp , December, 2013 Available online athttp:// ISSN Apex Journal International Full Length Research Paper Staff development programs and job performance: Implications for productivity in Lagos state ministry of education Odili, Julius Beneoluchi Department of Computer Science, University of Lagos, Nigeria. Accepted 15 November, 2013 Productivity has been a major topic of discourse in many for across the nation since our independence from the colonial masters in Up till now, successive governments have initiated programs to improve job performance which is a necessity for increased productivity. This article, therefore, investigates the staff development programs of the Lagos State Ministry of Education and its relationship with the job performance of her workforce. This research employs the descriptive survey research design using the stratified random sampling research technique in its investigation. It classified the Education Officers of the Lagos State Ministry of Education into three, namely, Junior Officers as being those on Salary Grade Levels 1-7, Middle-level staff on Salary Grade Levels 8-13 and the Senior Staff on Salary Grade Levels On the whole, it was discovered that the Lagos State Government has a number of staff development programs for her workforce in her Ministry of Education. This includes induction, computer appreciation, customer service / product delivery, personal professional development, school / office improvement, higher responsibilities, internet awareness for her staff in Salary Grade Levels However, there are a few additions to the staff development list for Senior Officers i.e. those on Salary Grad Levels Such additions include Time Management, Leadership skills Training, Minute writing, Management training and Computer training programs. Moreover, it was revealed that the staff development programs actually meets the staff development needs of the education officers, though the selection process is adjudged to be unfair, unjust and discriminatory. Again, the staff development programs are grossly underfunded. It recommends that the Lagos State Ministry of Education continues with her present suite of staff development programs using the present crop of resource persons, but as a matter of urgency review the selection process to ensure that all education officers have equal access to participate in such programs. They should also ensure that the programs are adequately funded as it is the assertion of her workforce that staff development programs enhance their performance and increase their productivity. Key words: Salary Grade Levels, Lagos, Officers, job, programs, education. INTRODUCTION Background The major objective of personal management in any human enterprise is the production of efficient and effective employees who shall optimally perform their duties and functions to realize the organizational goals. To realize this overriding goal, many organizations embark on staff development programs. The Lagos State Ministry of Education, like many other organizations, is becoming more and more involved in seeking and taking advantage of opportunities to improve the professional skills of the civil servants and improve their effectiveness. Effective staff development programs, according to Smith (1982) should take into account the nature of adult learners and the need for making learning accessible to them. He says that adults learn best when:

2 Odili 331 i. They feel the need to learn and given opportunity to make input into what, why, when and where they learn. ii. Learning content and processes bear a perceived and meaningful relationship to past experiences, and experiences are effectively utilized as a resource for learning. iii. What is to be learnt relates optimally to the individual s developmental challenges and life tasks iv. The amount of autonomy exercised by the learner is congruent with that required by the mode or method utilized. v. They learn in a climate that minimizes anxiety and encourages freedom to experiment; and vi. Their learning styles are taken into account. Training and development is an important phase in human resources management. Employees may become obsolete, redundant or rustic if they do not update themselves with new work methods, skills and foreknowledge about their work, their organization and the environment. The entire organization may also become rustic if it lacks a systematic means of continually developing and renewing organizational capabilities. Klat et al. (1985) as well as Peretomode and Peretomode (2001) reported that it has been estimated that an engineer s knowledge of his or her field is cut in half every ten years because of the advancement in his field unless he or she continues to work. This underscores the need for The Lagos State Ministry of Education is becoming more and more involved in seeking and taking advantage of opportunities to improve the professional skills of her workforce by arranging several in-service trainings, including the Lagos State Government cooperation with the World Bank that led to the great transformation called Eko Project. To date, virtually every teaching staff at the public Secondary Schools in the State Ministry of Education has undergone one form of training or the other in the past four years of this World Bank cooperation. This underscores the need to evaluate the effect of these and other similar training programs in the Lagos State Ministry of Education with a view to ascertaining whether or not these training and development exercises relate to the productivity of the education officers. Research questions 1. What are the staff developmental needs of the education officers in the Lagos State Ministry of Education? 2. What is the relationship between staff development programs organized by the Lagos State Ministry of Education and the staff performance? Research hypothesis There is no significant relationship between staff development programs organized by the Lagos State Ministry of Education and the job performance of her workforce. MATERIALS AND METHODS Research design This research adopts the descriptive research design. Descriptive research involves collecting data in order to test hypotheses and answer research questions raised in the study. It attempts to report things the way they are. Descriptive research, according to Best (Ofo, 2002) is concerned with conditions that exist; practices that prevail; beliefs, points of view, or attitudes that are developing and sometimes descriptive research is how and what is or what exists, or some preceding events that has affected a present condition. Population The population of this Study is all civil servants in Lagos State Ministry of Education. Sampling and sampling techniques This study adopts the proportionate stratified random sampling technique. The civil servants are classified into junior, middle-level and senior staff techniques: the junior staff being those on Salary Grade Levels 1-7, middlelevels on Salary Grade Levels 8-13 and the senior on Salary Grade Levels From the junior cadre, out of about 98 members of staff, a total of 19 staff, representing, 20% were randomly selected; from the middle-level, out of about 200 members of staff, 40 officers, representing 20% were selected and 24 officers out of the 120 senior staff forms the sample. Research instrument The research adopted the questionnaire in collecting data. The questionnaire is drawn on a four point Likert scale of Agree, Strongly agree, Disagree and Strongly disagree and checklist rating scale. The questions consist of three sections. The first session (Section A) solicits information on respondents bio-data; the second (Section B) solicits information on staff developmental needs, types of staff developmental programs organized by the Lagos State Ministry of Education, their content, mode, frequency, relevance and competence of the resource persons. Validity of instrument The questionnaire is validated by Dr. A.I. Fabiyi, practicing

3 332 J. Bus. Admin. Manage. Sci. Res. Table 1. Development needs for education officers. In my position as an education officer in the Ministry, my areas of need for training are as follows (a)skill acquisition (b)computer operation Professional development (d)customer service / product delivery (e)leadership training (f)office improvement (g)internet awareness (h)name others education officers at the Lagos State Ministry of Education and two other colleagues in the Department of Educational Administration in the University of Lagos. Reliability of the research instrument The reliability of the research instrument was determined by the Spearman Brown s Prophecy Formula and the correlation coefficient of 0.97 was obtained. Questionnaire administration It was observed that during the administration of the questionnaires that some people were averse to responding to questionnaires due to some personal biases. Others collected the questionnaires but for some reasons could not return them. Some of these reasons were envisaged by the researcher. So he deliberately printed 100 questionnaires and distributed about 95, though the target sample was 83. In all, out of the 95 questionnaires distributed, only 83 questionnaires were retrieved: 14 from the Junior Staff, 53 from the Middlelevel Staff and 16 from the Senior Staff cadres. Method of data analysis The data are analyzed using percentages and Chi Square in answering the research questions and testing the hypothesis respectively. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS Data generated for the research questions and hypothesis are presented and analyzed. Research question 1: What are the staff developmental needs of the education officers in the Lagos State Ministry of Education? From Table 1, the officers indicated that their greatest area of need is in the area of computer operations with 78 % of the respondents asserting this fact. This cannot be overemphasized in this computer age. There is basically no profession on earth that can run effectively without the aid of the computer today. So the request of the education officers for training in computer can be very understood. Next to this are need for skill acquisition and leadership training with 65.1% of the respondents gunning for these. It is interesting, however, that their least need is in customer service / product delivery where only 41% saw it as a need that needed upgrading. This is rather ridiculous. Do these officers mean that they are doing excellently well already and do not see the need for more training? In a third world where customer service is, to say the least, appalling? Rather disturbing is not only the fact that 16.9% of the respondents do not think they need to be trained or re-trained in customer service / product delivery but also that a whopping 42.2% completely evaded this question. This researcher feels that this require further examination /studies. In answer to this research question, therefore, it is correct to say that a sum average of 63.2% of the respondents answered in the affirmative that the above listed areas are, indeed, their areas of staff development needs with an average of 7.7% in disagreement and 29.1% undecided. So the areas of need for training of the education officers in the Lagos State Ministry of Education are skill acquisition, computer operation, professional development, customer service / product delivery, leadership training, office improvement and internet awareness. Research question 2: What is the relationship between staff development programs organized by the Lagos State Ministry of Education and the staff performance? Having identified the staff development needs of the education officers, the researcher s assignment here is to relate the staff development programs to the staff training needs in terms of their contents, frequency and mode of

4 Odili 333 Table 2. Staff development and staff performance. The contents of staff development programs in Lagos State Ministry of Education are: (a)geared towards meeting the individual staff needs (b)holistic. Drawing from staff experiences, cognition and behavior (c)focus on office development (d)focus on staff personal development (e)concrete and aimed at developing specific skills (f) Research-based and is aimed at better job performance Table 3. Programs and Staff needs of employees on Salary Grade Levels The staff development needs of the education officers are sufficiently addressed by the staff development programs of the Ministry Salary Grade Levels Salary Grade Levels Salary Grade Levels such staff development programs. The data obtained from the respondents is presented in Table 2. In evaluating the relevance of the development programs in terms of their contents, frequency and mode, 59% of the respondents assert that the employee development programs are geared towards their personal developments not to the disregard of the office development with 57.8% and being holistic, 56.7%. However, they score the programs a little lower than average, 44.6% with regards to the individual staff needs. It is the opinion of this researcher that these programs should take into cognizance the individual learning and working differences of the staff in designing the contents, mode and frequency of these development programs. In x-raying the relationship between the staff development programs organized by the Lagos State Ministry of Education and job performance of her workforce, 54.1% of the respondents agree that the staff development programs are relevant to the job performance of the education officers. That is to say there is a correlation between the employee development programs and the day-to-day job performance of the employees. However, a cumulative average of 16.6% of the employees disagrees with their colleagues. This number is quite significant and cannot be ignored, especially when weighted against the cumulative average of 29.3% of the respondents completely evaded this question. In summary, we can safely say, on the basis of the available statistics, that there exists a relationship between the staff development programs organized by the Lagos State Ministry of Education and job performance of her staff. Hypothesis testing Hypothesis: There is no significant relationship between staff development needs of the education officers and staff development programs organized by the Lagos State Ministry of Education. Level of significance: 0.05 In testing this hypothesis, let us consider the data obtained in answer to question 10. Table 3 presents the responses of the education officers based on their levels: Junior, Middle-level and senior cadres. The hypothesis is tested using the Chi Square and the T-Cal is and T-tab is Since T-cal is greater than T-tab, we reject Ho and conclude that there is a significant relationship between staff development needs of the education officers and staff development programs organized by the Lagos State Ministry of Education.

5 334 J. Bus. Admin. Manage. Sci. Res. Conclusion One of the most popular themes of discussion in symposia, seminars and live talk-shows in the world media today is productivity. It has been discovered that with the ever-growing world population, the world is going for a major catastrophe if the rate of productivity does not grow at a rate faster than the population. The Lagos State Ministry of Education is not spared in this line of thinking hence she is massively involved in several employee development programs in order to enhance the productivity of her workforce. Staff development programs are organized both for personal and organizational development. The array of staff development programs organized by the Lagos State Ministry of Education covers learning to produce an outcome, reach goals and bring about a change. From this it can be seen that the present employees development programs of the Ministry addresses the staff development needs of the education officers and confirms the position of Smith 4 that effective staff development programs address all three types of learning: learning to produce an outcome, learning to meet needs and reach goals coupled with learning to bring about a change. Similarly, the outcome of this investigation confirms Gall and Sander (1985) position that learning for adults should be goals-oriented. Gall and Sanders (op. cit) emphasize this point in their claim that one reason for staff development is personal professional development that aids job performance. Moreover, the selection process for participation in these programs should be clearly defined. A situation where some education officers have been in the service of the Ministry for some years and have not undergone any employee development program leaves much to be desired. It is highly recommended that the selection process for these programs should be fair, just and nondiscriminatory. This will help create a more favorable working environment and eliminate mutual distrust, suspicion and inferiority or superiority complexes that hinder performance. In addition, the Ministry should motivate her present crop of resource persons that so impressed the respondents. As much as 90.4% of the respondents affirm the competence of these officers. REFERENCES Gall, M.D., Sanders S.R (1985). Effective development for teachers: A research-based model. Eugene: Eric Clearinghouse on Educational Management, College of Education, University of Oregon. Klatt, L.A., Murdick, R.G., Schuster F.E (1985). Human resource management. Columbus: Charles E. Merril Publishing Company Peretomode V.F., Perotomode O. (2001). Human resources management. Lagos: Obaro and Ogbinaka Publishing Limited Smith, R.M. (1982). Learning how to learn: Applied theory for adults. Chicago: Follett Publishing Company Recommendations Based on the findings of this research, it is hereby recommended that the Lagos State Ministry of Education should properly educate her workforce on the place for staff development programs in their day-today assignments, personal as well as professional development in the Ministry.