Intrinsic Employee Motivation and Contextual Job Performance:

Abstract

In the business management realm, employee motivation and job performance could be perceived as over researched. The perception was however overstated because of generalized conceptions, vocational differences and business contexts perpetually overlooked in previous human resource literature. For this reason, this study was narrowed to the interaction between intrinsic motivation and contextual job performance among part-time academics. Specific focus was about for-profit (henceforth private) universities of Kampala metropolitan left in research obscurity. This motivation was analyzed as function of personal autonomy, social affection, and organizational inspiration, while job performance was conceived as student contextual support, teamwork and corporate responsibility. The study adopted a descriptive and correlational research design in which data was collected from a sample of 175 respondents, and analyzed based on SPSS version 20.0. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used for analysis. Results show that intrinsic motivation of the target part-time university academics was mainly fairly sufficient (x̅ = 2.793; s=1.17). And at x̅ = 3.07; s=1.25, their contextual job performance was largely more moderately rated. Performance was a bit more fairly high, surpassing their motivation. In that case, it was not surprising that such intrinsic motivation and contextual performance were weakly and not significantly related (r0.171*; p= 0.073). In fact, motivation predicted only 1.4% of that job performance. It was thus surmised that contextual performance of the target academics could have been more driven by extrinsic motivation, or other individual factors such as personality. More importantly, intrinsic motivation should be priority to all stakeholders of such private universities because it is a fundamental human resource factor that could sustainably trigger greater university corporate business productivity.