Employee Characteristics and The Occupational Stressors-Job Performance Relationship: Moderation Effect Explored Among Academic Staff In Public Universities In Kenya
1Joshua Mburu Ndung’u, 2 Dr. Anne Wanjiku Sang, 3 Dr. Boniface Matayo Ratemo
1PhD Candidate,
Department of Business Management,
Dedan Kimathi University of Technology, Kenya.
2 Senior Lecturer,
Dedan Kimathi University of Technology, Kenya.
3 Lecturer,
Dedan Kimathi University of Technology, Kenya.
Abstract
The problem of poor job performance continues to be experienced among academic staff of universities in Kenya as attested to by the country being position 97 out of 137 in the higher education sector category rankings. Other statistics indicate that Kenya was ranked position 100 out of 132 countries in global innovation index in the year 2023 with a comparable ranking in other key performance indicators in the global arena yet there has been proposals on mitigations to address the problem of job performance. Some of the mitigations that have been proposed include changes in top organizational managers’ behaviours, improvement of work environment, organizational communication and employee empowerment. But among the studies, few have recommended interventions focusing on occupational stressors that affect the staff who discharge the core mandate of universities where research and innovation are supposed to be cultivated. Additionally, the few that have done so ignored the moderating effect of employee characteristics on the occupational stressors-job performance relationship. There was therefore a need for this study whose objective was to explore the moderating effect of employee characteristics on the influence of occupational stressors on job performance of academic staff in public universities in Kenya. The transactional model of stress and coping served as the anchor model. A positivist research philosophy was adopted with a descriptive research design. The target population was the 14,013 members of academic staff of public universities where a sample of 389 was picked through stratified random sampling but oversampled to 506 to cater for non-response. Self-administered questionnaires were used to collect primary data on which both descriptive and inferential analyses were carried out. This study established that employee characteristics did not have a statistically significant moderating effect on occupational stress-job performance relationship. Therefore, interventions for job performance can be implemented uniformly across all the academic staff irrespective of employee characteristics.
Key words: Occupational stressors, job performance, employee characteristics.
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