SOURCE:

Faculty: Education
Department: Vocational Education

CONTRIBUTORS:

Onojetah,S.O;
Okoye, K.R.E;

ABSTRACT:

The study investigated the human resource management competencies required by administrators for the effective management of tertiary institutions in South-South, Nigeria. The competencies examined in this study include: employee recruitment and selection, training and development, performance appraisal, compensation, discipline and conflict resolution. Thus, six research questions and six null hypotheses guided the study. Descriptive survey research design was adopted for the study. The population for the study was 1,736 administrators from public tertiary institutions in the six South-South States of Nigeria. The sample size was 868 tertiary institutions administrators. The sample was drawn using simple random sampling technique. The instrument used for data collection was a structured 70-item questionnaire titled: Human Resource Management Questionnaire (HRMQ). The instrument was face-validated by three experts. For the purpose of ascertaining the reliability of the instrument, Cronbach Alpha reliability technique was used in which the cluster means obtained were 0.85 for B1, 0.90 for B2, 0.84 for B3, 0.87 for B4, 0.67 for B5 and 0.73 for B6. The reliability coefficient obtained for the entire instrument was 0.81. The data collected for the study were analyzed using mean scores and standard deviation to answer the research questions while analysis of variance (ANOVA) was employed to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. Based on the data collected and analysed, the study identified competencies that are highly required by administrators of tertiary institutions in South-South, Nigeria and these consisted of eleven competencies in recruiting and selecting potential employees, eleven competencies in employee training and development, ten competencies in employee performance appraisal, eleven competencies in employee compensation, twelve competencies in employee discipline and fifteen competencies in employee conflict resolution. The result revealed that there was no significant difference in the mean ratings of the administrators from universities, polytechnics and colleges of education on fifty-seven out of the seventy identified competency items required by administrators for human resource management, whereas there was significant difference in the mean ratings of the three groups of respondents on the remaining thirteen human resource management competency items. It is the conclusion of the study that the adoption of the identified human resource management competencies by the administrators of tertiary institutions will improve the morale of employees and boost their service delivery for higher productivity in the workplace. Based on the findings, the study recommended, among others, that there should be regular training and retraining, workshops, conferences and symposia on human resource management competencies for administrators of tertiary institutions in South-South geopolitical zone in Nigeria and the nation in general.