Extrinsic Motivation and Task Performance of Part-time Academic Staff of Profit Oriented Universities in Central Uganda

Abstract

Extrinsic motivation may be one of the forms of the perceivably over researched employee motivation, but it lacked separate and in-depth analysis in previous related research. So was employee task performance in literature on job performance. There was also a lot of mystery about the association between the two specific human resource variables. All this caused lingering questions for which this study examined the effect of extrinsic motivation on task performance especially among part time university academics, formerly eluded in previous research. The study was conducted in private universities as business entities where shrewd employee motivation decisions and gainful performance were anticipated. Central Uganda was covered for contextual purposes. The study was based on a descriptively correlational research design, and actually engaged a sample of 175 questionnaire respondents and 18 key interview informants from five stratified random universities in the region. It was discovered that extrinsic motivation was at x̅= 2.68; s= 1.09 largely moderate among the target part time university academics, and a bit surprisingly, their task performance was relatively higher at x̅= 2.92; s= 1.14. In so being, the two employee variables were negatively, weakly and not significantly related are= -0.015; p=0.877. In fact, extrinsic motivation of the university academics predicted only 1.9% of their job performance. It was concluded that the extrinsic motivation offered in the target private universities would instead diminish task performance of the part time academic staff if it wasn’t due to other factors at play in the corporate system. Key words: Monetary rewards, job motivation, supervision, working environment, class service quality, student assessment, and student achievement